Software-defined underwater acoustic networking platform and its applications

As underwater communications adopt acoustics as the primary modality, we are confronting several unique challenges such as highly limited bandwidth, severe fading, and long propagation delay. To cope with these, many MAC protocols and PHY layer techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we present a research platform that allows developers to easily implement and compare their protocols in an underwater network and configure them at runtime. We have built our platform using widely supported software that has been successfully used in terrestrial radio and network development. The flexibility of development tools such as software defined radio, TinyOS, and Linux have provided the ability for rapid growth in the community. Our platform adapts some of these tools to work well with the underwater environment while maintaining flexibility, ultimately providing an end-to-end networking approach for underwater acoustic development. To show its applicability, we further implement and evaluate channel allocation and time synchronization protocols on our platform.