A. Caiti, K. Grythe, J.M. Hovem, S.M. Jesus, A. Lie, A. Munafo, T.A. Reinen, A. Silva and F. Zabel
Comments: download (pdf).
Ref.: IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering Vol. 38 No.4, p.758-771, 2013.
Abstract
Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) are an emerging technology for a number of oceanic
applications, ranging from oceanographic data collection to surveillance applications. However, their
reliable usage in the field is still an open research problem, due to the challenges posed by the oceanic
environment. The UAN project, an European Union funded initiative, moved along these lines, and it was
one of the first cases of successful deployment of a mobile underwater sensor network integrated within
a wide-area network, which included above water and underwater sensors. This contribution together
with a description of the underwater network, aims at evaluating the communication performance, and
correlating the variation of the acoustic channel to the behaviour of the entire network stack. Results
are given based on the data collected during the UAN11 sea trial. During the experimental activities,
the network was in operation for five continuous days and was composed of up to four fixed nodes,
two autonomous underwater vehicles and one mobile node mounted on the supporting research vessel.
Results from the experimentation at sea are reported in terms of channel impulse response and signal to
interference plus noise ratio as measured by the acoustic modems during the sea tests. The performance
of the upper network levels are measured in terms of round trip time and probability of packet loss.
The analysis shows how the communication performance was dominated by variations in signal to
noise ratio, and how this impacted on the behaviour of the whole network. Qualitative explanation of
communication performance variations can be accounted, at least in the UAN experiment, by standard
computation of the channel impulse response and transmission loss estimate.
Acknowledgement:
This work was funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Program (FP7) under project UAN 225669.
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