Submerged Archaeological Heritage Preservation Through IoUT Environmental Monitoring

This paper describes the design and implementation of an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-maintain system for in situ real-time continuous environmental monitoring of underwater archaeological sites. The system is made of an underwater acoustic sensors network, a gateway edge router transmitting data to/from the cloud, and a cloud platform, which in turn runs analytics on measured data and presents analyzed data to users through web interfaces. ML-based data analytics tools allow to identify when in situ data gathered from different sensors show anomalous trends, providing useful information to users making decisions, e.g., on when to recalibrate the sensors and perform system maintenance. The system has been extensively evaluated in field by monitoring the water quality throughout the MUSAS project in the archaeological marine parks of Baiae and Egnazia, Italy, proving its reliability and effectiveness.