Abstract
The Underwater Internet of Things (UIoTs), as a specific genre of Internet of Things (IoTs), represent networked devices that exploit sensors and objects (deployed underwater) to collect and process oceanic data. The oceanic data represents a multitude of valuable information and exploratory artefacts, including but not limited to underwater temperatures, acidity, types and classification of marine life, quality of sea water, and minerals. When applied to context-sensitive information collected from UIoTs, data analytics can provide valuable insights into the stakeholders (e.g. environmentalists, marine explorers, oceanographers) for decision making and intelligence about underwater data (i.e. smart oceanography). We propose to unify the concept of UIoTs with data analytics to (i) enable the sensor-driven collection of context-sensitive oceanic data, (ii) apply data analytics to derive useful information, and (iii) provide reporting and data-driven intelligence to the stakeholders. To support this, we have developed a layered architecture and evaluated it using a real-world case study on analysing oceanic data. Results of evaluation streamline the usability and efficiency of the architecture in terms of (a) sensors throughput (i.e. stability), (b) query response time (i.e. performance), and (c) ease of use for stakeholders (i.e. usability). The proposed solution complements existing research and development on IoTs for smart cities and specifically contributes to UIoTs in thesmart oceans. Results and their evaluation demonstrate the architecture's applicability as a proposed solution and provide guidelines to engineer and develop emerging and next generation of UIoTs for ocean data analytics.