A distributed approach to underwater acoustic communications

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution September 2003A novel distributed underwater acoustic networking (UAN) protocol suitable for ad-hoc deployments of both stationary and mobile nodes dispersed across a relatively wide coverage area is presented. Nodes are dynamically clustered in a distributed manner based on the estimated position of one-hop neighbor nodes within a shallow water environment. The spatial dynamic cellular clustering scheme allows scalable communication resource allocation and channel reuse similar in design to land-based cellular architectures, except devoid of the need for a centralized controlling infrastructure. Simulation results demonstrate that relatively high degrees of interference immunity, network connectivity, and network stability can be achieved despite the severe limitations of the underwater acoustic channel

Cellular Underwater Wireless Optical CDMA Network: Potentials and Challenges

Underwater wireless optical communications is an emerging solution to the expanding demand for broadband links in oceans and seas. In this paper, a cellular underwater wireless optical code division multiple-access (UW-OCDMA) network is proposed to provide broadband links for commercial and military applications. The optical orthogonal codes (OOC) are employed as signature codes of underwater mobile users. Fundamental key aspects of the network such as its backhaul architecture, its potential applications and its design challenges are presented. In particular, the proposed network is used as infrastructure of centralized, decentralized and relay-assisted underwater sensor networks for high-speed real-time monitoring. Furthermore, a promising underwater localization and positioning scheme based on this cellular network is presented. Finally, probable design challenges such as cell edge coverage, blockage avoidance, power control and increasing the network capacity are addressed.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

An efficient scalable scheduling mac protocol for underwater sensor networks

Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) utilise acoustic waves with comparatively lower loss and longer range than those of electromagnetic waves. However, energy remains a challenging issue in addition to long latency, high bit error rate, and limited bandwidth. Thus, collision and retransmission should be efficiently handled at Medium Access Control (MAC) layer in order to reduce the energy cost and also to improve the throughput and fairness across the network. In this paper, we propose a new reservation-based distributed MAC protocol called ED-MAC, which employs a duty cycle mechanism to address the spatial-temporal uncertainty and the hidden node problem to effectively avoid collisions and retransmissions. ED-MAC is a conflict-free protocol, where each sensor schedules itself independently using local information. Hence, ED-MAC can guarantee conflict-free transmissions and receptions of data packets. Compared with other conflict-free MAC protocols, ED-MAC is distributed and more reliable, i.e., it schedules according to the priority of sensor nodes which based on their depth in the network. We then evaluate design choices and protocol performance through extensive simulation to study the load effects and network scalability in each protocol. The results show that ED-MAC outperforms the contention-based MAC protocols and achieves a significant improvement in terms of successful delivery ratio, throughput, energy consumption, and fairness under varying offered traffic and number of nodes

TS-MUWSN: Time synchronization for mobile underwater sensor networks

Time synchronization is an important, yet challenging, problem in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs). This challenge can be attributed to: 1) messaging timestamping; 2) node mobility; and 3) Doppler scale effect. To mitigate these problems, we present an acoustic-based time-synchronization algorithm for UWSN, where we compare several message time-stamping algorithms in addition to different Doppler scale estimators. A synchronization system is based on a bidirectional message exchange between a reference node and a slave one, which has to be synchronized. Therefore, we take as reference the DA-Sync-like protocol (Liu et al., 2014), which takes into account node's movement by using first-order kinematic equations, which refine Doppler scale factor estimation accuracy, and result in better synchronization performance. In our study, we propose to modify both time-stamping and Doppler scale estimation procedures. Besides simulation, we also perform real tests in controlled underwater communication in a water test tank and a shallow-water test in the Mediterranean Sea.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft