UnetStack: An agent-based software stack and simulator for underwater networks

To deploy successful underwater networks in the face of challenges such as low bandwidth, long propagation delay, half-duplex nature of links, high packet loss and time variability, we require highly optimized network protocols with low overhead and significant cross-layer information sharing. UnetStack is a network stack designed to provide a good balance between separation of concern, and information sharing. By replacing a traditional layered stack architecture by an agent-based architecture, we provide additional flexibility that allows novel protocols to be easily implemented, deployed and tested. In discrete-event simulation mode, UnetStack can be used on desktop/laptop computers or computing clusters to simulate underwater networks and test protocol performance. In real-time simulation mode, it can be used to interactively debug protocol implementations, and test deployment scenarios prior to an experiment. Once tested, the protocols can simply be copied to an underwater modem with UnetStack support, and deployed in the field. The stack implementation has been extensively tested, not only through carefully calibrated simulations, but also in several field experiments. We provide an overview of UnetStack and briefly discuss a few deployments to illustrate some of its key features.