Underwater acoustic network protocol stacks: Simulator-based vs. OS-based

As underwater acoustic network technologies become relatively mature, several protocol stack frameworks have been proposed and implemented. However, it is still an open problem to evaluate protocol stack frameworks. To evaluate their performance and help users to choose a proper solution, we propose several performance criteria, namely, timing accuracy, memory usage, power consumption, learning curve, and support of both simulation and emulation. As a case study, we evaluate and compare the performance of Sunset and Sealinx, which are Simulator-based and OS-based respectively. Through the tests, we find that Sealinx outperforms Sunset in terms of timing accuracy and memory usage efficiency. As for support of simulation, Sunset can run at simulation scale while Sealinx still runs in realtime. However, the results from Sunset's simulation mode and emulation mode could be inconsistent, due to the timing accuracy issue in its emulation mode.