Effect of signal length in cross-correlation based underwater network size estimation

Signal length possesses a very important role in size estimation of underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN). As size estimation is very tough in UWSNs using conventional protocol techniques, a cross-correlation based technique is introduced to estimate the number of nodes. In UWSN, The greater the signal length, the more energy is required to perform the estimation. In this paper, we observe the effect of signal length (Ns) over the number of estimated nodes (N) in a spherical region of an underwater acoustic sensor network (UASN) using three sensors and investigate the error in node estimation for different Ns. As the theoretical required Ns is infinity (Ns = 10⁶ samples is used in simulation), using minimum Ns how it is possible to go through a successful estimation process i.e., accurate node estimation is being observed and discussed.