SpreadUW: specification and analysis of a routing algorithm for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Underwater Acoustic Networks are an innovative field of study. They represent a completely new scenario for all the researchers and more and more people are interested in it. In the following work I will introduce a new approach to the routing problem in Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs). The existing literature covers the the medium access control, and link control layers of the ISO/OSI protocol stack very well, but comparatively less attention has been devoted to the Network Layer. In literature there are several routing techniques that can be transposed to UAN; however they are scenario-dependent, that is, techniques that work well only under particular assumptions. In UAN is very difficult to develop a general routing protocol. As a matter of fact shallow water, deep water, superficial waves, fixed nodes, mobile nodes, networks with or without sinks, nodes with or without location awareness (etc.) are scenarios that require ad-hoc protocols, in order to take full advantage of the envi- ronmental characteristics. What I am going to do is to define an algorithm that works in every connected network, without any knowledge of the signal propagation patterns or other environment-related features. Furthermore, the protocol I developed could be used as term of comparison for future works. The thesis is organized as follows. Section 1 contains a brief introduction about UAN, section 2 introduces some basic concepts underlying this work, such as network stacks and routing protocols, section 3 contains related work, section 4 contains considerations about the statistic of the underwater channel, section 5 describes the new protocol I developed, section 6 contains the results of the simulations, and finally sections 7 and 7 contain proposal for future development of SpreadUW and conclusions