Determining the Suitability of FPGAs for a Low-Cost, Low-Power Underwater Acoustic Modem

Few dense underwater wireless sensor networks exist because commercial acoustic modems are designed for sparse, long range, applications and are thus too expensive and power consuming for small, dense, sensor nets. In order to enable the proliferation of dense underwater sensor networks, a new low-cost, low-power acoustic modem must be designed. This paper investigates whether an FPGA is a suitable platform for such a modem design. We present the design and in-water test results of a complete FPGA implementation of a Frequency Shift Keying underwater digital transceiver and compare its cost and power consumption to other research underwater digital transceivers implemented on different hardware platforms.