Towards the Internet of Underground Things: A Systematic Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in Internet of Underground Things, focusing on communication, networking, and localization techniques, and discusses applications, challenges, and future research directions in this emerging field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of communication technologies, networking issues, and localization methods specific to IoUT, highlighting recent progress and identifying research challenges.

Findings

Wireless and wired communication technologies are used for underground data transfer.

Various applications like oil, agriculture, and seismic mapping benefit from IoUT.

Research challenges include underground propagation environment and technology integration.

Abstract

This paper provides recent advances in the area of Internet of Underground Things (IoUT) with emphasis on enabling communication technologies, networking issues, and localization techniques. IoUT is enabled by underground things (sensors), communication technology, and networking protocols. This new paradigm of IoUT facilitates the integration of sensing and communication in the underground environment for various industries such as oil and gas, agriculture, seismic mapping, and border monitoring. These applications require to gather relevant information from the deployed underground things. However, the harsh underground propagation environment including sand, rock, and watersheds do not allow the use of single communication technology for information transfer between the surface and the underground things. Therefore, various wireless and wired communication technologies are used for underground communication. The wireless technologies are based on acoustic waves, electromagnetic waves, magnetic induction and visible light communication while the wired technologies use coaxial cable and optical fibers. In this paper, state-of-art communication technologies are surveyed, and the respective networking and localization techniques for IoUT are presented. Moreover, the advances and applications of IoUT are also reported. Also, new research challenges for the design and implementation of IoUT are identified.