A testbed for collaborative development of underwater communications and networking

The possibilities opened with the increased use of autonomous underwater vehicles and their potential interactions with existing or prospective submerged sensor networks create an end-user technological pull on the communication capabilities for the underwater domain. Simulation models, while fundamental in the scientific and technological development process cannot offer the feature richness of the physical environment and may potentially mask software and hardware behaviours exposed by the real world. This paper presents a testbed implemented by the NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), deployed to foster cooperative development of underwater communications and networking by providing an “hardware-in-the-world” capability to scientists and engineers. The data collection infrastructure provides a comprehensive data set of environmental measurements relevant to underwater acoustic propagation, arbitrary waveform generation within two frequency bands (useful for channel probing and testing of modulation schemes), full band raw acoustic data recording and access to two sets of fundamentally different commercially available acoustic modems. This structured data collection allows for a comprehensive analysis of the environment variables, their impact on the acoustic channel evolution and how this affects end-to-end connectivity of acoustic modems which can be used to steer the design choices for networking protocols.