A uw-Cellular Network: Design, Implementation and Experiments

The most significant increase of current task is in the desire for operational flexibility and agility in large-scale underwater network application scenarios in recent years. In order to address the challenging problems in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs), we propose a large-scale UWSN based on the cellular network architecture called Underwater Cellular (uw-Cellular) network. It is designed especially for application scenarios where a large number of both fixed and mobile network nodes exist in a wide area to monitor the underwater environment. We also design protocols in each network layer in order to ensure reasonable channel sharing, data forwarding path selection and data reliability. The purpose of the simulation study we implement is to evaluate the performance of the CLA routing strategy compared to the VBF and the MFLOOD protocols in the uw-Cellular network. We also deploy a twenty-node uw-Cellular network in the real-world environment as the field case study. The experimental results showed that the Data Rate between any nodes could reach above 500 bps, and the network Average Throughput was no less than 550 bps under various load situations.