Abstract
Internet-of-Underwater-Things (IoUT) systems comprising tens or hundreds of underwater acoustic communication nodes will become feasible in the near future. The development of scalable networking protocols is a key enabling technology for such IoUT systems, but this task is challenging due to the fundamental limitations of the underwater acoustic communication channel: extremely slow propagation and limited bandwidth. The aim of this article is to propose the JOIN protocol to enable the integration of new nodes into an existing IoUT network without the control overhead of typical state-of-the-art solutions. The proposed solution is based on the capability of a joining node to incorporate local topology and schedule information into a probabilistic model that allows it to choose when to join the network to minimize the expected number of collisions. The proposed approach is tested in numerical simulations and validated in two sea trials. The simulations show that the JOIN protocol achieves fast convergence to a collision-free solution, fast network adaptation to new nodes, and negligible network disruption due to collisions caused by a joining node. The sea trials demonstrate the practical feasibility of this protocol in real underwater acoustic network deployments and provide valuable insight for future work on the tradeoff between control overhead and reliability of the JOIN protocol in a harsh acoustic communication environment.
Highlights
M ODERN developments in underwater acoustic modem capabilities will make large-scale underwater acoustic networks (UANs) of the order of tens to hundreds of nodes feasible in the near future
The JOIN protocol is evaluated in a series of Monte Carlo simulations implemented in MATLAB and its performance is quantified using the metrics described in Section III: time until convergence of the joining node, network adaptation speed, and the number of collisions caused by the joining node
The JOIN protocol was presented to allow the integration of new nodes into an existing IoUT network without the control signaling overhead of typical state-of-theart methods, and without reducing the network throughput capacity by using dedicated communication resources for this task
Summary
M ODERN developments in underwater acoustic modem capabilities will make large-scale underwater acoustic networks (UANs) of the order of tens to hundreds of nodes feasible in the near future. Such large-scale UAN deployments will enable the extension of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies to the ocean environment. This new emerging IoT application is referred to as the Internet of Underwater. Manuscript received November 10, 2019; revised February 5, 2020; accepted April 12, 2020. Date of publication April 17, 2020; date of current version October 9, 2020. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the USMART under Project EP/P017975/1 and Full-Duplex project (EP/R003297/1), in part by the Royal Society International Exchanges Programme under Grant IES\R2\181125, in part by the Center for Cyber Law and Policy at the University of Haifa in conjunction with the Israel National Cyber Directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office, and in part by the Israeli Ministry of Science under Grant 3-16728 and Grant 3-16573. (Corresponding author: Roee Diamant.)
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