Design and Evaluation of Propagation-delay-limited Low-cost Communication Systems

Nowadays, embedded communication systems are everywhere in our lives, and they are playing a more and more important role in research and development. To help develop a reliable communication system quickly for users or developers, first we introduce a toolchain---RaPTEX, which is a rapid prototyping tool for embedded communication systems. Its goal is to bridge the gap between the need for embedded communication systems and the difficulty in their design. First we target at low-cost underwater acoustic communication systems in which it is very challenging to develop a reliable and efficient protocol due to the severe environment. This toolchain can predict the resource usage, such as computation cycles, memory cost and energy requirements by using static code analysis techniques. We verify this RaPTEX toolchain based on a biotelemetry application in extremely shallow water (2 to 3 meters in depth). In this application, we demonstrate the use and output of the toolchain and verify the accuracy on real hardware.;Second, we investigate and optimize protocol performance. Much protocol analysis is based on theoretical simulation or analytical modeling. We implement two commonly used protocols for underwater communication and compare several aspects of their performance using real-world tests. We also propose an energy-efficient adaptive protocol for underwater comm nication, which can provide more throughput while saving energy.;Third, we develop an acoustic communication network for a down-hole drilling application. There are many challenges to designing such a communication system for the petroleum industry, such as attenuation, interference and how to communicate. Various systems or patents have been proposed to provide wireless well bore communication. However, they are usually very expensive and few are commercially feasible or easy to implement successfully. We explain how to identify the problems and introduce several techniques and protocols to these challenges. We introduce our low-cost acoustic communication system and verify its functionality in the drilling field.