An OFDM based channel aware access protocol for underwater acoustic networks of submarine pipeline monitoring

Focused on underwater wireless acoustic communication and networks for data collection, this paper proposes a channel aware multichannel protocol for deep water pipeline monitoring system, where multiple sensor nodes report monitoring information to the drilling platform in the dynamically selected channel with subcarrier adaptive modulation. A two-stage channel selection and adaptive modulation protocol with both statistic and instantaneous channel information is proposed to optimize system performance. This scheme can be used in both vertical and horizontal pipeline monitoring system, and can be easily expanded to a common data collection network. Simulation results have shown its improvement compared to traditional FDMA scheme with random channel access.