Design and performance evaluation of aquatic-pollution monitoring scheme over a Waterborne Wireless Sensor Network

Spillages of pollutants such as oil or biochemical materials at sea have the potential to damage not only the offshore environments, but also the regional economy. Accordingly, this study develops an aquatic-pollution detection and tracking scheme, designated as AquaView, based on a Wireless Sensor Network deployed over an offshore region (i.e., a Waterborne Wireless Sensor Network (WWSN)) to track the moving boundary of a pollution spill such that cleanup operation can be effectively monitored and controlled. In evaluating the boundary tracking performance of AquaView, a 3D Floating Mobility Model (3D FMM) is used to simulate the movement of the sensor nodes floating on the ocean surface. The numerical results confirm that the 3D FMM model accurately reproduces the statistical features of the ocean current, wind and surface wave effects on the 3D trajectories of the sensor nodes. Moreover, it is shown that AquaView achieves a significantly improvement in a satisfactory boundary estimation performance and a low communication cost.