Underwater acoustic network node design and anechoic pool network experimentation with five nodes

Abstract

In this paper, an underwater acoustic network system is presented and produced, which consists of five underwater acoustic node devices with a networking capability. The underwater acoustic network system adopts the high speed hardware architecture of DSP plus FPGA, and utilizes a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) mechanism when networking. The system could not only supply quick and reliable underwater acoustic communication at a physical layer, but also complete stable networking at higher layer based on TDMA. At the physical layer, a one-hop underwater acoustic communication rate of 500 bit/s at the range of 2000m is achieved. And the system could complete node localization of the network through a ranging method between neighbouring nodes. At the upper layer, a TDMA medium access control mechanism is produced in the presented underwater acoustic network system. Finally an anechoic pool experiment has proved the stability and validity of the proposed underwater acoustic network system.