Puget sound underwater networking TestBed

Abstract

Underwater communications is the necessary enabler for several next-generation engineering and scientific applications such as distributed undersea monitoring, persistent surveillance, and long-range high fidelity navigation. Underwater acoustic channels (characterized by long propagation delays and small coherence bandwidths) continue to present significant challenges and reliable networked communications remains a future goal. To this end, a joint collaboration between a number of partner universities (Ocean-TUNE project, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation), seeks to implement an underwater networking testbed to conduct field tests for better understanding of the underwater acoustic channel characteristics. A key feature of the deployment is a new multicarrier (OFDM) modem - a first for such a testbed to the best of our knowledge - complemented with a software driven protocol stack implementation that allows adaptation to acoustic channel characteristics. In this paper, we first provide an architectural overview of our network testbed, followed by initial results from preliminary testing in Lake Union (Puget Sound), WA. We conclude the paper with a brief description of future plans.