A SDN-controlled underwater MAC and routing testbed

Abstract

Efficient data communication among autonomous under-water vehicles (AUVs) is difficult. Challenges include the long propagation delays arising with acoustic communication solutions, and line-of-sight requirements for optical transceivers. Existing multi-hop routing approaches are not always appropriate due to node mobility. This work presents a centralized approach to network control, exploiting the observation that AUV networks will have a bounded number of nodes. The paper describes a SDN realization of AUV networking, and documents the implementation of a small-scale replica of the system in our testbed, which can be accessed remotely via a web page and SSH. We then demonstrate the functionality of our implementation by evaluating the performances of two existing MAC protocols namely Slotted FAMA [11] and UW-Aloha [13], in a multi-hop, underwater scenario.