On The Performance of Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks: An Experimental Approach

In this paper, we propose an experimental approach using both the bit error rate (BER) and signal detection quality to enhance the performance of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN) while at the same time decreasing network power consumption. Furthermore, we use information theory to analyze and study the impact of using mobile/moving sensor nodes, as opposed to fixed nodes in UWSNs. We report on computer simulations and indoor pool experiments carried out to verify our experimental approach. We developed a software tool “SAM Control,” written in the MATLAB programming language, to facilitate our experiments. SAM Control coordinates and manages the communications between the acoustic modems used in our experiments, while at the same time allowing data gathering of all experimental observations, and performance analysis of power consumption, BER, entropy of the message signal, mutual information, and information loss. A simulation study of the underwater acoustic channel model is also presented.