A cross-layer communication solution for multimedia applications in underwater acoustic sensor networks

Abstract

Underwater multimedia acoustic sensor networks will enable new underwater applications such as multimedia coastal and tactical surveillance, undersea explorations, picture and video acquisition and classification, and disaster prevention. Because of the different requirements of these applications, it is needed to provide efficient differentiated-service support to delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant data traffic as well as to loss-sensitive and loss-tolerant traffic. The objective of this paper is twofold: 1) explore the interactions of different underwater communication functionalities such as modulation, forward error correction, medium access control and routing, and 2) develop a distributed cross-layer solution integrating specialized communication functionalities that cooperate to allow multiple devices to efficiently and fairly share the bandwidth-limited high-delay underwater acoustic medium.