(Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 2003-09)
Bohner, Christopher George
A novel distributed underwater acoustic networking (UAN) protocol suitable for ad-hoc
deployments of both stationary and mobile nodes dispersed across a relatively
wide coverage area is presented. Nodes are dynamically clustered in a distributed
manner based on the estimated position of one-hop neighbor nodes within a shallow
water environment. The spatial dynamic cellular clustering scheme allows scalable
communication resource allocation and channel reuse similar in design to land-based
cellular architectures, except devoid of the need for a centralized controlling
infrastructure. Simulation results demonstrate that relatively high degrees of
interference immunity, network connectivity, and network stability can be achieved
despite the severe limitations of the underwater acoustic channel.