| It is well known that submarines can hide successfully from traditional sonar systems. For this reason, we propose a new technique implemented via the utilization of mobile robots comprising Distributed Underwater Sensor Networks (DUWSNs). In the design and operation of DUWSNs, the arising challenging issues are: (1) the establishing of reliable communication links among the sensor nodes; (2) the maximization of the life time of the network; (3) the sustaining of sufficient data rate within the network; (4) the architecture of the DUWSN and the routing policies deployed; (5) the effectiveness of the DUWSN, regarding submarine detection and identification. This thesis contributes towards an understanding of, and solution to, the impact of the latency on DUWSNs in underwater acoustic environments. Moreover, a new underwater K-Cells transmission protocol is implemented to overcome and exploit the large propagation delay inherent to acoustic underwater networks. We develop a novel DUWSNs that consists of mobile elementary nodes (ENs), a backbone network of cluster-heads (CHs) and a Base Station (BS). We provide a DUWSN node clustering technique that attains high data rate and low energy consumption; the DUWSN utilizes the audio signal emitted by the submarine's engine to detect its presence. We also present some simulation results using MATLAB. |
