On the Performance of Underwater Mobile Acoustic Sensor Networks:Work in Progress

In this paper several computer simulations and pool experiments have been carried out to verify and demonstrate underwater communication between moving acoustic sensor nodes over different distances achieving optimum mutual information. We have developed GUI software “SAM-control” that generates m-sequences of 1023 length, handles their transmission and communications between sensor nodes. In addition, it performs numerical calculations of the probability of error, entropy of message signal, information loss, bit error rate, cross correlation, and mutual information. Simulation study of the underwater acoustic channel model is also presented. Our work shows that the use of mobile acoustic sensors in underwater communication system is able to provide a reliable wireless link with low probability of error (<0.003) for different sensor velocities. In addition, it is achieved comparable results in terms of the performance based on information theory aspects. Keywords— mutual information, channel capacity, maximum rate of information, underwater sensor communication, acoustic channel, collaborative network channel, parallel network channel.