An Efficient Topology Discovery Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Considering that nodes have no knowledge of the network topology information at all at the initial stage of underwater acoustic network (UAN) deployment, the topology discovery technology is required to complete the acquisition of the entire network topology so that the scattered nodes can be constituted a UAN where nodes can be connected with each other. In addition, in the actual marine surveillance and detection, the need for multiple networks to be merged is increasing day by day. In the process of merging two or more different UANs, the topology discovery technology that supports network merging becomes very critical. In this paper, an Efficient Topology Discovery Protocol for underwater acoustic networks (ETDP) is proposed for heterogeneous UANs. Simulation results show that ETDP effectively complete topology discovery and nodes ID assignment with limited energy consumption and discovery delay. The proposed ETDP is a suitable network topology discovery mechanism for UANs.