Effect of Transporter Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for Underwater Optical Wireless Communication Considering Delay Tolerant Networks

Recently, underwater communication has been developing in many ways, such as wired communication, underwater acoustic communication (UAC), underwater radio wave wireless communication (URWC) and underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC). The main issue in underwater communication is the communication interruption because signals are affected by various factors. Consequently, communication links are unstable and real time communication is almost impossible. In this paper, we introduce transporter nodes, which move along a specified horizontal (H) or vertical (V) line, and facilitate message forwarding in Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) using FBR protocol for UOWC. We show the results for horizontal transporter (HT) and vertical transporter (VT) cases. We evaluate the effectiveness of Transporter Nodes (TNs) for DTN. The simulation results show that the delivery probability is higher in the case when we use THs. Even, VT can improve the delivery probability regardless of the number of AUVs. On the other hand, the effect of HT begins to appear when the number of AUVs exceeds 15. Also, if we use both HT and VT the simulation delivery probability is increased compared with the case when they are not used. From these results, we conclude That TNs can be used for effective communication in UOWC.