Introduction

Water covers 71% of the Earth. Underwater communication is essential for a wide assortment of applications covering defence, environmental monitoring, commercial exploration, and scientific discovery. Severe attenuation in water limits the range of electromagnetic, optical and magnetic induction-based communications to just a few meters, leaving acoustic communications as the de facto means for wireless data transfer across tens of kilometers.

NetSim’s UWAN library enables users to design, simulate and analyze performance of underwater networks that use acoustic communication.

_images/Figure-110.png _images/Figure-1a.png

Figure-1: Netsim Design Window and the Result dashboard and Plot window shown in NetSim after completion of simulation.

NetSim UWAN simulations are full stack with all 5 layers of the TCP/IP stack being supported as explained below:

  • L5, Application: Users can model various kinds of applications as explained in section 3.4. This library supports a new (and default) underwater sensor application - with small packet sizes (order of 10s of Bytes), and large inter-packet arrival times (orders of seconds) - that parallels typical underwater applications.

  • L4, Transport: UDP Protocol is supported. TCP is not provided as an option since it is not used in UWAN applications, due to the very low communication bit rates and the high propagation delays.

  • L3, Network: Static routing is supported.

  • L2, Data Link: Slotted-aloha protocol is supported.

  • L1, Physical: Specialized underwater acoustic PHY model and the Thorp propagation model, are supported. Omni directional antennas are assumed.

UWAN is architected to interface with NetSim component 2 (Legacy networks) which provides L2 functionality and component 3 (Advanced switching and routing) which provides the L3 static routing functionality.

The UWAN library is available as Component 12 and is currently available only in NetSim Standard and NetSim Pro versions. Protocol source C code is open to users; it is modular and customizable to help researchers to design and test their own UWAN protocols.