UWSim-NET: An Open-Source Framework for Experimentation in Communications for Underwater Robotics

The communication with the remotely operated vehicles (ROV) in underwater applications are usually based on umbilical cables. The increase in the number of ROVs in cooperative interventions motivates the interest in underwater wireless communications. They have a high impact in robotic applications because of their limited performance in underwater scenarios. In this work we present UWSim-NET, an extension of the simulator for underwater robotics UWSim, which is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). UWSim-NET integrates a communications module based on Network Simulator 3 (NS3) that allows to model the physical and data link layers. Experiments demonstrating the capabilities of UWSim-NET in modeling the propagation delay, intrinsic delay in communication devices, packet loss, packet collisions and the impact of medium access control (MAC) protocols are also presented in this work.