The Smart City concept is starting to extend into maritime environments alongside with the increase of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) models on the market. Consequently, by joining both Smart City and USV technologies, a set of platforms and applications for aquatic environments are emerging. This work proposes a low-cost aquatic mobile sensing platform for data gathering with a swarm of USVs communicating through a Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN). A set of DTN link quality-based routing strategies select the best quality path in a dynamic approach so the sensed information is able to reach the mobile gateway in a reliable way. A Link Quality Estimation (LQE) approach is proposed and its accuracy is evaluated through real experimentation. An aquatic simulation environment, considering both navigation and communication layers, was also proposed and used to evaluate the performance of the proposed routing strategies, and complement real environment performance studies.
Keywords: aquatic mobile sensing platform; delay tolerant network; forwarding strategies; link quality estimator; low-cost systems; simulation and real experimentation; unmanned surface vessels.