A new amphibious network infrastructure with hybrid acoustic and radio links

Due to limited bandwidth and slow propagation speed, acoustic multi-hop connections in conventional underwater networks are much less efficient than terrestrial networks. To solve these problems, we propose the concept of amphibious networks, which are composed of hybrid acoustic and radio links. A water-surface radio network is seamlessly connected with the underwater acoustic (UWA) network, and serves as the transmission backbone network. This new network infrastructure can improve underwater multi-hop communication. The underwater hop count is expected to be limited to a minimum, thus saving routing overhead and reducing mutual interference of underwater communications. Some key issues of this new network infrastructure are discussed in this paper.