Enabling Subsea IoT Through Power Harvesting, Hybrid Communication, Integrated Sensing, and Resident AUVs

Subsea production systems increasingly rely on continuous monitoring, autonomous inspection, and timely access to operational data to maintain asset integrity, safety, and environmental compliance. Despite significant advances in underwater sensing and robotics, most offshore installations remain dependent on hardwired power and communication infrastructure, which constrains scalability, flexibility, and long-term autonomy. While wireless subsea communication technologies are mature in defense and oceanographic applications, their adoption within offshore energy has been limited primarily by power availability and uncertainty in long-term system reliability. Recent developments in offshore sensing and monitoring have demonstrated the viability of compact wave energy converter systems for powering standalone oceanographic instruments and low duty cycle environmental sensors. These early deployments have primarily targeted metocean data acquisition, environmental compliance monitoring, and scientific observation, where power demand is modest and data transmission requirements are limited. While technically successful, such systems have generally remained isolated from core offshore production infrastructure and have not been scaled to support higher power, higher data rate, or mission critical subsea operations. In parallel, the offshore oil and gas industry is undergoing a structural shift toward digitalization, autonomy, and reduced human intervention. Subsea fields are increasingly reliant on remote monitoring, condition-based maintenance, and robotic inspection to manage asset integrity, flow assurance, and safety over extended lifecycles. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles are progressively transitioning from campaign-based inspection tools to resident systems that require reliable subsea docking, charging, positioning, and data exchange. This transition fundamentally increases both the energy demand and the communication complexity of subsea systems deployed at depth. The use of compact Wave Energy Converter systems has demonstrated the feasibility of harvesting surface wave energy to power low-duty-cycle oceanographic instruments and environmental monitoring sensors. However, these systems have largely remained isolated from core offshore production infrastructure and have not been extended to support higher-power subsea functions such as hybrid wireless communication, autonomous vehicle docking and charging, or sustained multi-sensor operation. Scaling wave-powered solutions to these use cases introduces coupled challenges related to energy availability, data volume, transmission scheduling, and system resilience under variable sea states [1, 2]. Fig.1 highlights the integrated surface-to-seabed architecture, showing how wave energy harvesting, mechanical station keeping, and subsea power and communication delivery are combined in a single, fully coupled system. The heave-plate provides hydrodynamic damping to stabilize the surface node, while the seabed interface supports sensing, communication, and autonomous vehicle operations.