Design and development of innovative systems for the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT)

IoUT nowadays has become a key research field, which has led the scientific community to devote itself to the study and development of innovative solutions. One of the biggest challenges concerns wireless communication because of the many limitations of the underwater communication channel. The most widely used technology is the acoustic wave as it is the only one that enables long-distance communication. Nevertheless, it presents many challenges and requires the development of ad-hoc technologies and protocols. This thesis has two main objectives. The first concerns the development of a system for the use of underwater acoustic networks to be applied to several application scenarios that have become essential in recent years, namely environmental monitoring and assistance to diver operations. The proposed systems have been tested directly in the field. The second objective concerns the possibility of enabling these systems to be able to transmit large amounts of data, such as images, overcoming the limitations imposed by the underwater acoustic channel. In this regard, an ad-hoc routing algorithm is proposed that can transmit a lot of data over multi-hop networks.