Aquatic Fronthaul for Underwater-Ground Communication in 6G Mobile Communications

Underwater networks are expected to be service platforms for broad-sea and deep-sea activities. The significant challenge of underwater communication has been achieving high-speed and long-distance data transmission due to the high-attenuation and time-varying channel state in underwater environments. It is reasonable to get the underwater data above the water surface for establishing underwater-ground networks. However, it is still an unsolved issue to efficiently establish underwater-ground communication channel. To address this problem, we propose an aquatic fronthaul for underwater-ground communication, where floating aquatic relay nodes relay data from underwater drones/sensors to a ground radio unit. We propose a relocation algorithm for aquatic relay nodes to efficiently reconstruct the network according to the distribution of underwater nodes. The advantage of the proposed algorithm is robustness for the uncertainty of underwater node locations due to the difficulty in underwater localization. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated with multi-agent simulations. The feasibility of the aquatic fronthaul network was confirmed via the experimental results with a Wi-Fi mesh network above the water.