A Multi-Controllers Architecture for Software-Defined Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

The advancement of communication, computing, and the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) led to the blooming of marine applications. However, due to the constrained resources of underwater nodes and highly dynamic underwater environment, traditional Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) become incompetent for such enormous demands. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising approach to improve the flexibility and reliability of UASN. This paper introduces an SDN-enabled UASN with multi-controllers called SM-UASN. Firstly, a hierarchical framework of SM-UASN is offered. Then the energy consumption model and communication process of SM-UASN are established. Finally, we implement a simulation platform for SM-UASN by integrating Mininet and the NS-3 underwater acoustic network (UAN) module. SM-UASN is compared with the traditional single-sink-based UASN (TS-UASN), the traditional multi-sink-based UASN (TM-UASN), and the SDN-based UASN with a single controller (SS-UASN). The result reveals that our proposed architecture significantly prolongs the network’s lifetime and increases the throughput.