Sensor networks for environmental data acquisition will play an important role in the development of future large data acquisition systems, particularly in oceanographic observation and operational oceanography. Within these scenarios, many challenges will be overcome by using emergent networking technologies which have been successfully tested in other fields where distributed systems are used. This paper deals with the development of a smart sensor architecture for a marine sensor network (MSN) aiming to construct flexible and scalable devices, in both hardware components and software elements. Data heterogeneity is a handicap for the implementation of any MSN, and greater effort is therefore required in designing sensor systems that can be easily integrated and networked. In hardware design we present an approach to integrating elemental sensor systems in IEEE1451 infrastructure using a microcontroller and embedded systems. Using this platform a software system is designed for solving several problems such as scalability (both data and acquisition devices), plug and play behavior, and remote maintenance. This work forms part of a research project of distributed acquisition systems in marine environments (LabVir) in which several acquisition systems have been successfully implemented on Spanish oceanographic ships and in Antarctic research stations. This paper gives a general description of MSN. Some architecture elements named in this paper will be implemented (or tested) in the near future. This will allow us to validate their convenience