Survey of hardware platforms for an energy efficient implementation of matching pursuits algorithm for shallow water networks

Coral reefs worldwide are in serious decline. Underwater wireless sensor networks may be the answer to providing the persistent monitoring presence needed to obtain the data necessary to better understand how to protect these ecosystems for the future. Many advances have been made in underwater acoustic communication devices for underwater wireless sensor networks, but a major challenge that still remains is obtaining an energy efficient modem design. To begin to address this challenge, we implement the Matching Pursuits algorithm for channel estimation, an energy consuming portion of an existing underwater acoustic modem designed for shallow water networks, on a variety of hardware platforms. We determine that a dedicated field programmable gate array (FPGA) intellectual property core provides the most energy efficient hardware platform for Matching Pursuits which motivates future work to port the entire modem design to an FPGA for an energy efficient modem design.