Impact of Sensor Network Topology on Acoustic Communications for Protecting Marine Mammals

This paper focuses on marine mammal protection via the detection of maritime vessels through an underwater network of acoustic sensors. An approach is proposed for assessing the traffic of acoustic messages, and its dependency on network topology. A unique challenge for those systems is that their own communications acoustically pollute the environment and thus must be controlled. In this publication, physics-based models are used to capture the unique features of underwater acoustic propagations, which determine when a vessel detection will occur. When coupled with an experimentally-proven networking scheme, the present method helps determine how frequently detection messages are generated, (re)transmitted, and received. Numerous realistic examples help illustrate the main concepts.