Power Management for Acoustic Underwater Networks

As a result of the large area to be monitored in most underwater sensor network applications, many acoustic networks have a sparse topology. The underwater acoustic channel characteristics can cause power consumption of nodes to be quite high. This paper presents information on a work in progress to design a power management scheme for asynchronous node communication to maximize the power efficiency of such an acoustic underwater network. The proposed scheme takes advantage of the propagation delays introduced by the underwater channel and relies on the usage of a high-power and a low-power acoustic modem to perform the data exchange. While the high-power modem is used to achieve high-bit-rate data exchange between nodes, the low power modem is used for node discovery. This paper presents some background information and preliminary experiments carried out along with details on the proposed power management scheme.