Design of Optical-Acoustic Hybrid Underwater Wireless Sensor Network

High-speed underwater wireless transmission technologies are urgently demanded to transmit three-dimensional high-resolution observation data timely in ocean exploration. Currently, underwater acoustic sensor networks have obtained long transmission distance, but with low data rate, high power consumption, high cost and damage to marine mammals. Meanwhile, underwater optical communications can achieve high data rate, but have difficulty in networking and short communication distance. This paper proposes a novel Optical-Acoustic hybrid Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (OA-UWSN), which uses optical communication for high-speed transmission at close range and acoustic communication for transmitting control commands and node localization. OA-UWSN accomplishes long-distance optical transmission through directional optical communication and multi-hop transmission. The problem of difficult networking in optical communication is solved by designing full-space optical repeaters. By taking the characteristics of directional optical transmission, SDMA technology is employed in the data link layer to improve efficiency. A routing protocol based on reverse route search is designed to extend network lifetime and adapt to frequently changing topology. This paper provides a solution for real-time video and image wireless transmission in marine exploration and new methods for high-speed transmission of marine detection information.

Journal of Network and Computer Applications