If there were a modern reboot of "The Little Mermaid," Ariel would probably tell Sebastian that living under the sea was a pain because of the shoddy Wi-Fi connection. But a research team at the University of Buffalo in New York might be able to grant Ariel's wish of a better underwater Internet. Tommaso Melodia, the director of the Wireless Networks and Embedded Systems Lab at the university, said that his research wasn't so much to create a new Internet below the sea but to make sensors and other underwater electronics more accessible to land-based devices, such as laptops and mobile phones. "We're looking to make underwater networks a part of the Internet, so you can access them without specialized equipment or software," he told ABC News. In addition to monitoring pollution levels or reading geological data to better predict tsunamis, Melodia believes law enforcement agencies would find an underwater Internet useful as well. "I've been reading ... that there's a lot of drug trafficking from South America to North America via submarine," he said. "You could create networks of devices that can detect this type of activity." http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/underwater-internet-make-ocean-wi-fi-friendly/story?id=20587056 Thursday, October 24, 2013
Underwater Internet to Make Ocean More Wi-Fi Friendly
If there were a modern reboot of "The Little Mermaid," Ariel would probably tell Sebastian that living under the sea was a pain because of the shoddy Wi-Fi connection. But a research team at the University of Buffalo in New York might be able to grant Ariel's wish of a better underwater Internet. Tommaso Melodia, the director of the Wireless Networks and Embedded Systems Lab at the university, said that his research wasn't so much to create a new Internet below the sea but to make sensors and other underwater electronics more accessible to land-based devices, such as laptops and mobile phones. "We're looking to make underwater networks a part of the Internet, so you can access them without specialized equipment or software," he told ABC News. In addition to monitoring pollution levels or reading geological data to better predict tsunamis, Melodia believes law enforcement agencies would find an underwater Internet useful as well. "I've been reading ... that there's a lot of drug trafficking from South America to North America via submarine," he said. "You could create networks of devices that can detect this type of activity." http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/underwater-internet-make-ocean-wi-fi-friendly/story?id=20587056 