Underwater Network Topology Inference Technology for Random Direct Access Protocol

In an underwater adversarial environment, obtaining the network topology of the enemy is critical to formulating the combat strategy and executing the targeted operations. However, it is a great challenge to parse the underwater network topology when the relevant network communication content cannot be obtained. Therefore, this paper proposes a method for inferring the underwater network topology specifically for random direct access protocol, which can infer the network topology without participating in network communication and demodulating the signal. Firstly, the method collects the start time of the transmitted signal of the underwater acoustic sensor network and the time of the signal's arrival at the sensing node. Accordingly, the time of the signal reception of each node could be calculated. Secondly, considering the time continuity between the received and the returned signal in the random direct access protocol, the connectivity between nodes is judged according to it. Finally, collecting all the nodes that may have continuity in signal reception time and transmission time within the perception time interval, the network topology is obtained by setting the threshold and excluding the false links. The simulation results on the Aqua Sim Ng simulation platform show that the method can infer the network topology with high accuracy.