SEANet

Abstract

As of today, Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) are heavily dependent on commercially available acoustic modems. While commercial modems are often able to support specific applications, they are typically not flexible enough to satisfy the requirements of next-generation UANs, which need to be able to adapt their communication and networking protocols in real-time based on the environmental and application conditions. To address these needs, we present SEANet (Software-dEfined Acoustic Networking), a modular, evolving software-defined framework for UAN devices that offers the necessary flexibility to adapt and satisfy different application and system requirements through a well-defined set of functionalities at the physical, data-link, network, and application layers of the networking protocol stack. SEANet is based on a structured modular architecture that enables real-time reconfiguration at different layers, provides a flexible platform for the deployment of new protocol designs and enhancements, and ensures software portability for platform independence. Moreover, we present a prototype of a low-cost, fully reconfigurable underwater sensing platform that implements the SEANet framework, and discuss performance evaluation results from water tank tests.