Modelling and Simulation on Acoustic Channel of Underwater Sensor Networks

The reliability of the modelling system mainly depends on the simulation of underwater acoustic channel characteristics. The reliability of simulator is improved because of the use of Bellhop in NS-Miracle. World Ocean Simulation System (WOSS) can retrieve the data of marine environment by accessing the database of seabed depth, sound speed profile and seabed sediment, and transmit them to Bellhop simulator automatically, so that the model is closer to the actual underwater acoustic transmission channel than not using WOSS. In order to verify the reliability of NS2/NS-Miracle simulation system with WOSS, a centralized underwater sensor network with five nodes is simulated on the integrated simulation system. The characteristic empirical model, Bellhop Ray-Tracing model, and WOSS combined with Bellhop model are, respectively, adopted to simulate underwater acoustic channel. The results of three types of simulation, such as average throughput, average delay, and packet error rate, and simulation time are very close under the same condition. It proves that the accuracy of integrated simulation system is as excellent as that of NS-Miracle. However, WOSS can automatically acquire the actual sea environment parameters and provide them to the simulator, which can improve the authenticity of the simulation system. Furthermore, three MAC protocols, Aloha-CS, CSMA/CA, and DACAP, are simulated on the integrated simulation system under the same condition including ocean environment, network topology, and parameters. The results show that the performance of CSMA/CA is greater than the other protocols in such networks. It also proves that the integrated simulation system can accurately simulate the relevant characteristics of the MAC protocol.