Sea trials of an underwater acoustic network in the East China Sea 2015

Underwater acoustic communication networks have gained more and more attention in recent years due to their good prospects in the application of environmental monitoring, underwater surveillance, disaster forecasting, and so on. A sea trial of an underwater acoustic communication network, with up to 10 nodes, was carried out near Shengsi in the East China Sea, in June 2015. The trial was designed with the aim of obtaining application experience in underwater network deployment and in order to evaluate the performance of protocols in a real-world environment. In the physics layer, M-ary spread spectrum communication and the passive time reversal processing are adopted. In data link layer, RTS/CTS handshake based MAC is applied. In the network layer, a reactive routing protocol is tested. In this paper, the configuration of the MODEM, system architecture, and experimental procedure and results are all given. By sea trial, it is demonstrated that the robustness of the network in performing multiple nodes sharing channel and route setup in a realistic underwater environment.