Experimental results of Delay-Tolerant Networking in underwater acoustic channel using S2C modems with embedded sandbox on-board

Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) technology enables the nodes of an underwater acoustic network to communicate under conditions of frequent link disruptions and in networks topologies, in which end-to-end connections may never be available. Our implementation was based on the DTN2 open-source project, which represents a reference implementation of the DTN protocols and is designed as an experimental platform containing a set of DTN functionalities. The use of DTN2 in underwater networks provides for the nodes an opportunity to communicate even if the link between them often disrupts. To make DTN2 working with Evologics S2C modems, there was designed and implemented a new convergence layer called DMAC CL. This convergence layer was implemented in DTN2 open source project which was running in the “sandbox” (onboard) of the S2C modems during the experiments. The article aims to present the experimental results of delay-tolerant networking collected during REP14 sea trials, organized and carried out in Atlantics by the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in July 2014.