An NS-3-based Underwater Acoustic Network Hardware Verification System

As a powerful technology for underwater wireless information transmission,underwater acoustic communication has important applications in the fields of marine defense strength construction,underwater environment sensing and positioning cruise.Due to the limitation of underwater complex environment and underwater acoustic channel,the difficulty of underwater acoustic communication is no less than that of deep space communication.Therefore,the exploration and utilization of underwater acoustic communication technology is a hot research field.In general,the introduction of a hydroacoustic network protocol to a real application requires three phases: early research based on software simulation,preliminary underwater experiments based on hardware nodes,and on-site field measurements of the system.At present,the research on a large number of underwater acoustic network protocols is still basically in the early stage of research based on software simulation.On the one hand,due to the complexity of the underwater acoustic channel and dynamics model,it is necessary to deploy the solution to the underwater hardware node for field testing,in order to make a more accurate evaluation of the network performance,and lay a solid foundation for future practical applications.On the other hand,field testing is expensive,time-consuming to build,and it takes a lot of time to rewrite the code after rewriting the simulated solution.And because of the different implementation methods,there are likely to be significant differences between the simulation results and the actual test results.This paper combines the NS-3 network simulator and the underwater acoustic hardware system,and proposes a hardware verification system for underwater acoustic network research.Based on the UAN framework of NS-3,the system designs a multi-threaded interface module combining physical and virtual layers to realize the data stream docking between the UAN protocol stack and the real physical layer,namely the underwater acoustic communication machine.The water is built on the interface module design.The sound network hardware verification system operates in the mode of "real underwater environment + hardware node + virtual protocol stack".Since the current UAN framework is not suitable for its own network layer and routing layer,the framework is still immature.Therefore,this paper firstly expands the UAN framework,implements support for different routing protocols,and proposes a fastest path energy-efficient routing.Algorithm: FPES-Flooding.The simulation proves that the proposed FPES-Flooding route has higher packet delivery rate and lower energy consumption than the traditional Flooding route.Finally,in the same network topology scenario,the feasibility of the proposed system is verified by comparing the experimental results of the proposed simulation system with the real underwater experiment mode.The system can firstly study the proposed underwater acoustic network protocol based on NS-3 software in pure simulation mode.Then,it does not need to rewrite the code,only need to switch to the real hardware mode,and use the NS-3 designed in this paper.The virtual simulator combined with the virtual reality of the network emulator and the real hardware,combined with the underwater acoustic hardware device,can directly perform underwater experiments based on hardware nodes.The system can effectively accelerate the real application of the underwater acoustic network protocol to the actual scene.