Marine Environment Monitoring Using Wireless Sensor Networks: A Systematic Review

During the past decade, marine environment monitoring has attracted more and more researchers around the world and various marine environment monitoring systems have been developed. Traditionally, an oceanographic research vessel is used to monitor marine environments, which is very expensive and time-consuming and has a low resolution both in time and space. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have recently been considered as a promising solution for this purpose since they have a number of advantages such as easy deployment, unmanned operation, real-time monitoring, and relatively low cost. This paper first describes a common architecture of WSN-based oceanographic monitoring systems and a general architecture of an oceanographic sensor node. Then, it presents a detailed review of some related projects, systems, and technologies. It also highlights major challenges and research opportunities on the development and deployment of wireless sensor networks for marine environment monitoring.