Studying the Influence of UAC on Network Performance in Real Sea Experiments

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have been widely concerned by academia and industry. As the primary communication way of UASNs, underwater acoustic communication is characterized by its long propagation delay, path loss, multi-path effect, Doppler shift, and noise interference. Those characteristics affect network performance in terms of network throughput, end-to-end delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay. In this paper, we conducted field tests on many occasions and analyzed the impact of the underwater acoustic channel (UAC) on the performance of UASNs based on real sea experiment data. The experimental results showed that vulnerable UAC would cause packet loss and thus decrease network performance. This paper is meant as a petri dish to provide valuable guidance in the field of UASNs.