Data Transportation Across Clusters of Distributed Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

This work explores the discovery of gateway agents to facilitate the transportation of data across clusters of distributed, surface denied, underwater acoustic sensor networks along an underwater acoustic backbone network to a centralized access point with surface access. The gateway discovery protocols presented herein demonstrate methods to allow agents to become self-aware of their role in the network and partition the backbone network from the underwater acoustic sensor network clusters in a kite-like graph topology; a topology that is used in the practice of connecting surface denied sensor clusters to a multi-modal access point. A naive and improved protocol for gateway discovery is presented and the benefits and computational cost are discussed.