A Delay-Tolerant Networking Framework for Mobile Underwater Acoustic Networks

Abstract — In the operation of mobile underwater acoustic networks, protocols designed for traditional wired and RF wireless networks perform poorly or not at all. Successful operation underwater- an extremely unreliable medium- requires protocols that can adapt to their environment without relying on the network to send configuration messages. In order to support such protocols, we propose a formalized augmentation of the OSI model of network-ing, making use of the data that is generally discarded or not extracted from messages as they move between the individual protocol layers. Our model captures and harnesses this data in order to make sophisticated and relevant judgments about the state of the network, and to create feedback loops that can adapt each layer’s protocol to the current environment. We further propose a Delay-Tolerant Networking framework that incorporates our augmented model, pro-viding net-centric applications a more interactive net-working API than TCP/IP network sockets. This inter-activity enables the mobility of nodes to benefit rather than inhibit the performance of the network, and provides a foundation for autonomous creation of ad-hoc mobile underwater communication infrastructures to meet an application’s immediate needs. I