As part of the move to ubiquitous computing, sensor networks are an active topic for
academic and commercial research. A variety of sensor network products and applications
are appearing in the market. Environmental monitoring is a major application field
for sensor networks, and the end users of such applications are generally average
disciplinary scientists, i.e. environment researchers or ecologists. However, most
current commercial sensor network products need extensive secondary development for
adapting to different circumstances. This process, including replacing, adding, configuring
and calibrating sensing elements, and configuring the network, is a difficult task
for untrained end users. This paper introduces an ongoing project - Underwater Sensing
Platform Network (USPN) - being developed at the University of Queensland which focuses
on improvement of sensor network usability by providing a truly smart, plug-and-play
sensing platform. Our approach is to investigate a novel architecture of a sensing
node supporting different sensors and communication channels based on plug and play
functionality to simplify the building and configuring process and to reduce the complexity,
time and cost for deploying an environmental sensor network. The paper will describe
both the system specification for the USPN plug-and-play marine sensor system, plus
an initial system design.