Time Evolution of Underwater Acoustic Temporal Networks

Abstract

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) become increasingly important in various underwater applications, including the real time monitoring of ocean environments, persistent undersea surveillance and disaster prevention etc. UASNs with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) as mobile nodes have the potential to execute many tasks flexibly, such as the ocean dynamic observation. However, the mobility of UASNs introduces many challenges to the design of network protocols, as well as the acoustic connectivity changes over time due to the ocean environments. Compared to static networks, the temporal networks can reach controllability faster, demand orders of magnitude less control energy, providing a new theory of environmental adaptation for UASNs. Based on the study of network connectivity and statistics from a real sea experiment, we analyzed the dynamic process on time evolution of the network structure. The topology controllability on underwater temporal network is briefly discussed for future studies.