Message in a Bottle: Extending Communication Coverage Via Boat-to-Boat WiFi Communication

Maritime tasks have been costly and challenging due to the geographical, spatial, and dynamic nature of the area of operations. With the high deployment cost and unreliability of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASV) have been recently deployed to perform various maritime tasks. In this paper, we propose communication methods to reduce maritime task data retrieval. We define an optimization problem that leverages Device-2-Device (D2D) WiFi communication to retrieve data beyond the radio range of the central data-collection entity. We empirically analyze WiFi performance on-water given single-hop and multi-hop D2D communication. We quantitatively compare two data retrieval methods: \em end-to-end ad-hoc and \em hop-by-hop opportunistic. Our results highlight that while the inexpensive hop-by-hop opportunistic helps cover larger areas, end-to-end ad-hoc performs up-to 60× faster delivery.