A back-seat driver for remote control of experiments in underwater acoustic sensor networks

This paper presents a novel system to remotely control and reconfigure an heterogeneous underwater acoustic sensor network in scenarios with no direct access to all the underwater nodes after their deployment. The system uses the SUNSET framework to interact with and to operate the underwater network via single-hop and multi-hop acoustic transmissions. Users can remotely configure the underwater devices and the tests to run without the need to retrieve or bring to the surface the deployed nodes. The system allows the user to select different protocol stacks, protocol parameters and device behavior policies and to investigate the performance of several network configurations in an easy and fast way, avoiding that most of the experiment time is used to prepare the tests rather than to actually run the tests and collect the results. The presented mechanism has been successfully tested and validated during three in field campaigns, considering different underwater environments and communication devices. Our results show that the time to remotely control and reconfigure several batteries of tests for a variety of network configurations reduces to few tens of seconds, thus enhancing robustness and flexibility and significantly reducing the costs and logistic complexity of in field experiments.