Underwater Acoustic Networking Techniques

This is the authors' manuscript of the literature survey monograph " Underwater acoustic networking techniques " , published in the series " SpringerBriefs in Electrical and Computer Engineering ". The content is identical, but the published version has a much nicer layout, a handier format, and separate reference lists for each chapter. The authors have retained the rights to share this work in manuscript form with other scientists, and to host the authors' version on their own web sites, institutional repositories, or non‐commercial pre‐print servers. The overall goal is to develop and demonstrate the capability to establish an underwater ad hoc robust acoustic network for multiple purposes with moving and stationary nodes. One of the first research tasks in RACUN was a literature survey of state‐of‐the‐art in underwater acoustic communication networks. When this work was done, it was decided that it would be a pity to keep a thorough literature survey on this rapidly emerging topic internal to the project. Therefore, we are glad to publish a slightly edited version of the RACUN literature survey as a SpringerBrief. This literature survey presents an overview of underwater acoustic networking. It provides a background and describes the state of the art of various networking facets that are relevant for underwater applications. This report serves both as an introduction to the subject and as a summary of existing protocols, providing support and inspiration for the development of underwater network architectures. In recent years, other overview and survey papers have been published on the subject [4, 97, 90, 102, 115, 140]. These papers can be consulted in addition to the present survey, which is however more comprehensive. Developments in the field of underwater sensor and communication networks are rapid, and new papers and protocols appear continuously. The focus of this report is OSI layer 2 " Data Link Layer " and OSI layer 3 " Network layer ". Several definitions can be found on the term " Link layer ". In the OSI model, layer 2 " Data link layer " is split into two sublayers, MAC (medium access control) and LLC (logical link control). LLC is the upper of these sublayers. After an introduction in Chapter 1, topics bordering the physical layer (time synchronization, full‐ duplex links, and adaptive data rate) are discussed in Chapter 2. MAC is discussed in Chapter 3, where considerations on frequency‐division and code‐division multiple access are followed by …