Experimental Performance of an Underwater Acoustic Network: Operational Exchange of Navigation and Sensor Data

Underwater sensor networks, deployed in the water column or on the bottom, distributed over vast areas, require coordinated operation in many applications and, therefore, prompt data exchange among themselves. Organization of real-time access to data collected underwater requires sensors to be fitted out with digital communication means. In particular, the AUVs operating in a group require intensive exchange of navigation data when engaged in cooperative maneuvering or performing coordinated measurements, or agreeing on modifying the current mission with an operator on the surface support vessel. Paper presents development of an underwater acoustic sensor network. The technology enables data transfer in networks of arbitrary topology, the number of intermediate nodes between source and receiver may be fixed or variable, data delivery route can be static or dynamic. Particular implementation of the digital underwater acoustic network is represented in form of a program framework (EviNS- Evologics intelligent Networking Software) - a stack of network protocols, each of which is designed to solve the problem of hydro-acoustic data delivery under certain conditions of underwater acoustic environment. The program framework is implemented as open source code, enabling any adaptation of the framework to operate on different hardware platforms, in particular, the operation on the hardware platform (i.e. “on board”) of the underwater acoustic modems built upon the S2C technology. With this framework the underwater acoustic modem represents commercial or experimental platform allowing to combine the existing network protocols, as well as to integrate additional custom protocols (stack of customized protocols developed by end users).