GUWMANET — Multicast routing in Underwater Acoustic Networks

Underwater networks move more and more into the focus of the research community, especially for military purposes. They enable the full integration of underwater components like submarines or sensor platforms into maritime Network Centric Warfare (NCW). Nevertheless, most of the scientific work was done in physical layer methods and medium access protocols. In this paper we introduce a new network protocol called Gossiping in Underwater Acoustic Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (GUWMANET), which realizes medium access and routing functionality in a cross-layer design. In contrast to other routing approaches for underwater networks, we developed a network protocol from scratch, fitting the special needs of underwater communication, instead of adopting existing terrestrial protocol. We use multi-hop strategies to achieve a higher maximum transmission range than that of our physical layer method. Additionally, multicast addresses are used which allow an unlimited number of nodes. The routes between the nodes are build up automatically and need no preceding configuration, which allows a full ad-hoc capability including mobile nodes. In combination with the Generic Underwater Application Language (GUWAL), which has a 16 bit header with the multicast source and destination address, GUWMANET needs only 10 bits additional overhead. This is realized by using gossiping strategies, where each node itself decides whether it forwards the data or not.