An efficient topology discovery protocol with node id assignment based on layered model for underwater acoustic networks^†

Underwater acoustic networks are widely used in survey missions and environmental monitoring. When an underwater acoustic network (UAN) is deployed in a marine region or two UANs merge, each node hardly knows the entire network and may not have a unique node ID. Therefore, a network topology discovery protocol that can complete node discovery, link discovery, and node ID assignment are necessary and important. Considering the limited node energy and long propagation delay in UANs, it is challenging to obtain the network topology with reduced overheads and a short delay in this initial network state. In this paper, an efficient topology discovery protocol (ETDP) is proposed to achieve adaptive node ID assignment and topology discovery simultaneously. To avoiding packet collision in this initial network state, ETDP controls the transmission of topology discovery (TD) packets, based on a local timer, and divides the network into different layers to make nodes transmit TD packets orderly. Exploiting the received TD packets, each node could obtain the network topology and assign its node ID independently. Simulation results show that ETDP completes network topology discovery for all nodes in the network with significantly reduced energy consumption and short delay; meanwhile, it assigns the shortest unique IDs to all nodes with reduced overheads.