An overview of project COMPOUND: Cooperative Communications and Positioning in Mobile Underwater Networks

One of the challenges faced by future networks is to integrate heterogeneous segments whose protocols are optimized for very different conditions. This work provides an overview of project COMPOUND, which tackles problems in this class to interface an underwater acoustic network comprising both static and mobile nodes to the Internet. The main goal is to create value and foster new applications in a niche but strategically important area by making the data and assets in the network easily available to a wide community. This will reduce the time, effort, and cost needed to customize the network to suit a specific need. A key insight in COMPOUND is to extensively exploit knowledge of node positions, including submerged ones with no access to GPS, to configure the network parameters at multiple levels, from the Internet gateway down to a node’s physical layer. In turn, positioning is derived from observed data traffic on the network and collaborative exchanges between nodes, resulting in a system that tightly integrates positioning and communications. The paper discusses the proposed approach within the scope of current research on underwater acoustic communications and networking, describes application scenarios, envisaged technical solutions, planned developments, and identifies some of the possible impacts of this work.