Software Defined Underwater Communications: an Experimental Platform for Research

Underwater Acoustic Networks have become widely adopted in many marine and underwater contexts thanks to the increased availability of devices and technologies over the years. Even though the number of Commercial Off-the-Shelf devices has increased in the last decade, underwater technology still remains a very expensive asset to acquire. Moreover, the technology is almost always licensed and inaccessible to the user, to protect intellectual property and industrial patents. This last point is often a problem for the researchers that do not intend to make profit from algorithms or patented ideas but instead leverage on the existing technology to install and test their own solutions to advance the state of the art. Also, researchers very often resort to simulation and emulation to test and evaluate their algorithms: this approach not only guarantees freedom of implementation but also avoids the issues of organizing a field trial in the ocean or at sea, and is definitely cheaper. However, to prove the effectiveness of the proposed solutions in real environments, simulation may not be sufficient. In this paper we present a complete tool for testing and evaluating the full protocol stack, from application to physical layer, with both simulation and real field experimentation, that integrates the open source DESERT Underwater framework and a low cost software-defined acoustic modem.