Message Routing Criteria for Undersea Acoustic Communication Networks

Over the past several years, the Seaweb initiative has demonstrated steady progress in advancing the capabilities and performance of undersea wireless acoustic communication networks. With the forthcoming next-generation Seaweb, software and hardware improvements will allow for the implementation of dynamic message routing schemes, rather than the fixed/static routing implementations that have previously been used. In order to determine best path routes, dynamic routing methods such as the Dijkstra´s forward search algorithm require the set of link costs between all connected nodes in the network (link state database). Best path routing is determined by minimizing the total aggregate cost from the source node to the final intended destination node. The criteria and cost functions used for optimizing the routing will depend on the communications scenario objectives and the network topology. In this paper, the following route-cost criteria for undersea network performance are defined and evaluated: hop count, path length, message delivery latency, transmission security, power consumption, network longevity, and message delivery reliability. Comparisons between these cost criteria and their resulting optimum routes are shown for an hypothetical network topology.