Connected Internet of Things for Monitoring and Tracking of Endangered Whales

Connected Internet of Things (CIoT) integrates Internet of Things (IoT) in different domains (e.g., spatial, aerial, terrestrial, and underwater). CIoT enables monitoring and tracking in remote and large geographic areas, such as the Earth's poles, forests, and oceans. In this article, we envision a CIoT system for the near-real-time monitoring of endangered whale species. In the envisioned system, very high-resolution images from satellites and Internet of CubeSats shall be used for the autonomous detection and location determination of endangered whales. The obtained locations shall be used to determine the trajectory of surface autonomous vessels that will temporarily deploy an Internet of aerial and underwater things for the near-real-time monitoring of detected whales. We discuss the main entities involved in the envisioned architecture, data flows, and communication paradigms needed to implement the proposed CIoT architecture and the challenges to empower the envisioned system. We also point out future research directions to be solved towards a CIoT system for whale monitoring.