Disruption/delay tolerant networking with low-bandwidth underwater acoustic modems

In this paper we address the problem of creating fully transparent disruption/delay tolerant networks, in which some of the links are provided by low-bandwidth acoustic modems. Our approach involved extending the DTN Research Group Reference Implementation to support the WHOI Micro-Modem, pluggable MAC algorithms and on-the-fly data compression. We have shown, in field experiments, that our software architecture is able to create reliable communications between all nodes of a network, with several degrees of link disruption, compromised by WHOI Micro-Modems, Wi-Fi and Ethernet links. The current implementation can be improved further by using more compact control and routing information.