Comments: download file (cintal_rep)
Ref.: SiPLAB Report 03/11, SiPLAB, University of Algarve,2011.
Abstract
The Underwater Acoustic Network (UAN) project aims at conceiving, developing and testing at sea an innovative and
operational concept for integrating in a unique system submerged sensors with the objective of protecting off-shore
and coastline critical infrastructures. The fundamental idea behind UAN is that in order to obtain a sustainable gain
of performance both at the basic Point to Point (P2P) communication level and at the network level (across the whole
infrastructure), the whole communication system should be able to adapt itself to the physical acoustic propagation
conditions at that particular time and water volume where the experiment takes place. Within the scope of the project,
a high data-rate unidirectional P2P communication link used to transfer sizeable data, e.g. images, sonar signals,
from an agent (e.g. fixed or mobile node) to a base station is also considered. We consider the node employing a
single transducer modem with limited power and computation resources, while the base station employing the multi-hydrophone
array, with data acquisition system connected to a shore/ship lab via fibre optic cable for data processing with no
such constraints. Hence, an asymmetry both on the data flow and on the complexity is expected, i.e. a high data-rate
transmission from a node to the base station, and a low data-rate transmission from the base station to a node
and that among the nodes in the network. The communication between the agent to the array at the base station can
be considered as a Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) communication.