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