A DTN Supportive Network Simulator for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

During the past few years, underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have become a popular research topic, with research challenges focused on underwater communication techniques. With the characteristic of long propagation delay, narrow bandwidth, and frequently disconnected interruption, among others, UASNs can be viewed as delay/disruption tolerant networks (DTNs). The DTN protocol can provide reliable data transmission guarantee through the store-and-forward mechanism and custody transfer mechanism. However, the existing simulators and testbeds for UASNs can only present architectures to simulate, emulate or test new protocols for UASNs, while cannot implement simulations on DTNs. In order to improve transmission efficiency of UASNs, we target at doing research on DTNs over UASNs and develop a simulator to design, test and evaluate additional Bundle Protocol and algorithms in DTNs. With the help of the simulator, we can conduct various tests including protocols evaluations and underwater application developments.