Cross-layer protocol stack development for three-dimensional underwater Acoustic Sensor Network

There is a huge interest in the research community to explore the ocean using sensor networks. Various factors such as resource constraints of sensor networks, requirements of applications, properties of underwater acoustic communication and features of ocean environment have a big impact on the design and development of the network architecture as well as the protocol stack. For a long-term deployment of a network, energy efficiency is the most important design criteria. For achieving energy efficiency and overall improvement in network performance, a new approach of cross-layer protocol stack design is being explored by researchers. In this work, a cross-layer protocol stack has been developed for a three-dimensional Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network (UASN) that can be used for a long-term monitoring of ocean column. The proposed stack with cross-layer design combines physical layer, data link layer, network layer protocols along with time-synchronization, clustering and power level management. This protocol stack has been successfully implemented on the UnetSim which is an open source underwater network simulator. In this paper, the details of protocol stack, it's implementation on UnetSim along with results and analysis of results have been provided.