Underwater long-distances wireless communication study from CTL awarded at the IEEE SusTech 2023 student poster contest

The underwater long-distance wireless communication research of KAUST Ph.D. candidate Jiajie Xu, supervised by Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Mohamed-Slim Alouini and Assistant Professor Mustafa Kishk at Maynooth University, Ireland, has been recently awarded the second-place prize at the 10th IEEE Conference on Technologies for Sustainability (IEEE SusTech 2023) student poster contest which was held in Portand, Oregon, USA.

The work, titled "3H-UWAC (three-hop underwater wireless acoustic communication) based on SOFAR Plane: A Novel Relay Deployment Technique" investigated a novel strategy to realize the long-distance underwater wireless communication based on the SOFAR plane with a narrow vertical directive angle (VDA) which can improve the energy efficiency impressively.
According to the results obtained, 3H-UWAC is one of most promising technology to achieve the underwater wireless communication at a level of 1000 km. "As we know , this is the first time to analysis the coverage probability in such a big area, and the thousand-kilometer-level underwater wireless communication has laid the foundation for the large-scale underwater Internet of Things, which also makes it possible to build a global underwater wireless communication network," Alouini emphasized.

"Some insights are also proposed based on the analysis result. The relationships between the depth of the transmitters, the receivers, and the VDAS are investigated, and the two-step method to optimize the coverage performance is suggested, which can provide critical reference to the practical application in the future," Jiajie added.

“Eventually, our main objective is to propose a solution that helps to bring the underwater wireless communication into the global communication vision. We believe the proposed concept of small VDA communication will help with that purpose and enhance the communication distance with a high energy efficiency, and hence, give an extra motivation for the exploration of the underwater network,” Kishk noted.

This recognition by the IEEE is one of a quick succession of personal accolades for Jiajie, who also recently received the invitation to display a project he lead on "Fire Eye" which is an intelligent firefighting system in the Global Grad Show Dubai, 2022 and, together with Kishk and Alouini, received acceptance for publication in IEEE Internet of Things Journal regarding his research work on 3H-UWAC.  

More information available in the paper:

J. Xu, M. A. Kishk, Q. Zhang and M. -S. Alouini, "Three-hop Underwater Wireless Communications: A Novel Relay Deployment Technique," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2023.3262949.