Scalable Adaptive Networking for the Internet of Underwater Things

Nils Morozs, Paul D. Mitchell, Roee Diamant

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Internet-of-Underwater-Things (IoUT) systems comprising tens or hundreds of underwater acoustic communication nodes will become feasible in the near future. The development of scalable networking protocols is a key enabling technology for such IoUT systems, but this task is challenging due to the fundamental limitations of the underwater acoustic communication channel: extremely slow propagation and limited bandwidth. The aim of this article is to propose the JOIN protocol to enable the integration of new nodes into an existing IoUT network without the control overhead of typical state-of-the-art solutions. The proposed solution is based on the capability of a joining node to incorporate local topology and schedule information into a probabilistic model that allows it to choose when to join the network to minimize the expected number of collisions. The proposed approach is tested in numerical simulations and validated in two sea trials. The simulations show that the JOIN protocol achieves fast convergence to a collision-free solution, fast network adaptation to new nodes, and negligible network disruption due to collisions caused by a joining node. The sea trials demonstrate the practical feasibility of this protocol in real underwater acoustic network deployments and provide valuable insight for future work on the tradeoff between control overhead and reliability of the JOIN protocol in a harsh acoustic communication environment.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9070166
Pages (from-to)10023-10037
Number of pages15
JournalIEEE Internet of Things Journal
Volume7
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Manuscript received November 10, 2019; revised February 5, 2020; accepted April 12, 2020. Date of publication April 17, 2020; date of current version October 9, 2020. This work was supported in part by the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the USMART under Project EP/P017975/1 and Full-Duplex project (EP/R003297/1), in part by the Royal Society International Exchanges Programme under Grant IES\R2\181125, in part by the Center for Cyber Law and Policy at the University of Haifa in conjunction with the Israel National Cyber Directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office, and in part by the Israeli Ministry of Science under Grant 3-16728 and Grant 3-16573. (Corresponding author: Roee Diamant.) Nils Morozs and Paul D. Mitchell are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, University of York, York YO10 5DD, U.K. (e-mail: nils.morozs@york.ac.uk; paul.mitchell@york.ac.uk).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Adaptive network
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • medium access control (MAC)
  • node integration
  • underwater acoustic network (UAN)

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Signal Processing
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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