UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC COMMUNICATIONS: DATA PACKET SIZE OPTIMIZATION WITH PERFORMANCE METRICS OF THROUGHPUT EFFICIENCY AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY QUALIFIED UNDER DIFFERENT BIT-ERROR-RATE

The research in designing new underwater acoustic (UWA) routing protocols and UWA media access control (MAC) protocols has spurred up a great interest in the UWA research community. However there are only a handful of research works and publications on UWA channel parameter optimization, notably in the area of data packet size optimization in the context of UWA channel performance metrics and the related energy efficiency issue. At the current situation the author is able to find only a few published works on data packet size optimization for UWA communications in contrast to the similar works in the terrestrial radio wave wireless communications.

The author of this dissertation is thus motivated to embark on a research to find an effective mechanism or algorithm to determine the optimal data packet size for UWA data transmissions qualified by two of the UWA channel performance metrics (termed as 2Q), namely throughput efficiency and energy efficiency with respect to various bit-error-rate (BER). This research leads to the construction of various databases based on the two metrics (the 2Qs) under different BER conditions. These databases are to be indexed by the proposed algorithm as a look-up graph (or as look-up table) to determine the optimal data packet size for effective and efficient data transmission in the UWA channel. Extensive simulations were conducted using ns2 network simulator with its embedded MIRACLE packages running on Ubuntu platform.