A node discovery protocol for ad hoc underwater acoustic networks

Abstract

Abstract-A neighbor discovery protocol is proposed for initializing an ad-hoc deployable autonomous underwater system in which the nodes (floating sensors, crawlers, vehicles) have no knowledge of the system topology upon deployment. The goal is to establish multi-hop, minimum-power acoustic communication links over a given coverage area. The protocol uses distributed power control and random access to provide connectivity within a finite power budget and without global synchronization. Physical laws of acoustic propagation are taken into account, namely the distance-and frequency-dependent path loss, as well as large-scale fading which is modeled via log-normal distribution. Simulation results quantify the energy consumption, time to completion, and system reliability in the presence of fading. The key features of the protocol are simplicity of implementation and efficient use of power.

A Feasibility Analysis of an Application-Based Partial Initialization (API) Protocol for Underwater Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks

“…Most of the initialization methods exist as an initial stage of a MAC protocol, as proposed in [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ]. Moreover, they are a part of a routing protocol, as exemplified in [ 13 , 14 , 15 ], or part of a node discovery protocol [ 16 ]. Furthermore, they have been proposed under the simple assumption that all nodes in a network need to be initialized at once before the network transmits and receives data for applications.…”

Intermission-based adaptive structure estimation of wireless underwater networks

“…Consequently, peerto-peer communication [11] or bidirectional and static communication [12] simply do not apply to the communicationopaque undersea environment. The approach in [15] requires a priori knowledge of the network size, thus making it impractical if additional sensors are deployed and if some sensors fail or deplete their batteries.…”

“…In addition to the previous geometry requirement, the approach in [14] assumes that the received power from each node is identical. The node discovery in [15] focuses on minimizing energy consumption and requires that each node knows exactly the network size.…”

“…The attenuation and fluctuation of an underwater sound wave are such that at one instant the nodes nearest to a sound source can detect it whereas at another instant detection could be prevented [10]. To deal with varying network structures, research groups focused on estimating the number of network nodes [11], [12], [13], [14], [15]. In [11], the author proposes techniques terminating when a probe encounters a previously-visited node, which triggers a peer-to-peer communication with the node that initiated the probe.…”

An energy‐efficient asynchronous wake‐up scheme for underwater acoustic sensor networks

“…Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWSNs) have attracted much research interest in recent years because of their wide range of potential applications, such as marine resources exploitation, industrial instrumentation and control, military surveillance, and security monitoring . Compared with the terrestrial wireless sensor networks (WSNs), energy efficiency becomes even more critical for UWSNs where acoustic sensor nodes rely on non‐rechargeable and unchangeable batteries to provide essential power for long‐term sensing, data collection, and communication . Moreover, because of the high cost of acoustic underwater sensor nodes and the non‐trivial deployment cost, the number of nodes in UWSNs is often much smaller than that in the terrestrial WSNs, and the topologies of UWSNs are often predetermined and regular, for example, linear, ring, star, and grid topologies .…”