Efficient link discovery for underwater networks

We describe an efficient method to discover the topology of underwater acoustic networks (UWANs). By knowing the network topology, nodes can determine destinations and routing possibilities for their packets, and schedule transmissions accordingly. To detect the network topology, an initial phase is employed. Our algorithm aims to reduce the time overhead of this initial phase while accurately discovering acoustic links. To that end, our algorithm allows simultaneous transmissions from different nodes while controlling the number of possible collisions in an optimized fashion. Experimental results from the 14 days ALOMEx'15 sea expedition show that our algorithm is able to accurately detect the network topology in a much shorter time compared to benchmark methods.