Sensor Network Implementation Challenges in The Great Barrier Reef Marine Environment

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia consists of 3200 coral reefs extended over 280,000 km. Coral reef ecosystems are areas greatly susceptible to impact of global climate change as well as other man-made influences. This creates an urgent demand for the sensor network technologies to be deployed in order to perform essential environmental monitoring and information collection. Analysis of these data can provide predictive information on destructive events such as coral bleaching. This paper analyses sensor network deployment issues in relation to harsh marine environment. Definitions for different kinds of node displacements experienced in the sea are provided, namely first, second and third order displacements. The effect of these displacements on the communication between sensor nodes is also analysed. Further more, we propose to use Microsoft SensorMap to provide a platform to disseminate the information collected from weather stations and sensor networks to the worldwide coral reef research community and also to the worldwide sensor networks research community. Details about publication of data on the SensorMap from the existing Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) weather stations are provided.