On Capacity and Delay Scaling Laws in Underwater Acoustic Networks

Abstract

Network capacity is a fundamental issue for terrestrial wireless networks and underwater acoustic networks (UWANs). The underwater acoustic channel, which is characterized by a path loss depending on the transmission distance and the signal frequency, is quite different from the terrestrial wireless one. And sensor nodes are usually deployed sparsely in UWANs. The capacity of UWANs is much more difficult to analyze than that of terrestrial wireless networks. Based on special characteristics of UWANs, the capacity and the delay scaling laws in different UWANs are analyzed in this paper. First, we study the capacity scaling and the delay scaling in two-dimensional extended and dense networks. Then, the results are extended to three-dimensional UWANs.