• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.97-108
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• 2011

Systems for underwater environment monitoring and natural resources can be considered as a part of digital convergence where real-time data transmission is possible with the help of underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN). One of key technologies required for the deployment of the systems is underwater acoustic micro modem. In this work, we design and implement an acoustic modem equipped with a commercial omnidirectional transducer. We also make experiments at the northern Han river for the verification of the developed modem. According to the experiments, the modem supports the working distance of 250 m and the data rate of 200 bps with a negligible bit error rate. It is expected that the acoustic modem can be used for various applications based on UWSN in a near future.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39C no.4
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• pp.351-361
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• 2014

Compared to a terrestrial communication, the high BER(Bit Error Ratio) and low channel bandwidth are the major factor of throughput degradation due to characteristics of underwater channel. Therefore, a MAC protocol must be designed to solve this problem in UWASNs(Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks). MAC protocols for UWASNs can be classified into two major types according to the contention scheme(Contention-free scheme and Contention-based scheme). In large scale of sensor networks, a Contention-based scheme is commonly used due to time-synchronize problem of Contention-free scheme. In the contention-based scheme, Each node contends with neighbor nodes to access network channel by using Back-off algorithm. But a Slot-Time of Back-off algorithm has long delay times which are cause of decrease network throughput. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to solve this problem. The proposed scheme uses variable Slot-Time instead of fixed Slot-Time. Each node measures propagation delay from neighbors which are used by Slot-time. Therefore, Slot-Times of each node are optimized by considering node deployment. Consequently, the wasted-time for Back-off is reduced and network throughput is improved. A new mac protocol performance in throughput and delay is assessed through NS3 and compared with existing MAC protocol(MACA-U). Finally, it was proved that the MAC protocol using the proposed scheme has better performance than existing MAC protocol as a result of comparison.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.86-94
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• 2013

In this paper, we propose a network coding scheme that is one of the most promising techniques for overcoming transmission errors in underwater acoustic communications. It is assumed that the proposed scheme operates in a Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) network where multiple sensor nodes share the underwater acoustic channel in both the frequency and the time domains by means of orthogonal codes. The network topology deploys multi-hop transmission with relaying between multiple source nodes and one destination node via multiple relay nodes. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of the successful packet delivery ratio of end-to-end transactions under varying packet loss rates. A computer simulation shows that the successful delivery ratio is maintained at over 95% even when the packet loss rate reaches 50%.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.8
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• pp.774-780
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• 2009

This paper proposes a transmitted power saving method for underwater acoustic sensors considering the acoustic wave propagation characteristic that propagation loss increases more rapidly in higher frequency band. In the proposed scheme, sensor nodes are divided into a few groups based on the distance between sink node and the sensor node, and each group uses its own frequency band. The node group with longer distance uses lower frequency and the node group with shorter distance uses higher frequency. By means of such a distance-dependent frequency allocation, all sensor nodes are able to maintain a certain target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), but also save transmitted power. In addition, the optimum size of node group is obtained, and also a frequency allocation algorithm is proposed accordingly. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme saves transmitted power by more 10 dB comparing non-grouping methods.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.1-10
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• 2021

The interest in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs), along with the rapid development of underwater industries, has increased. To operate UWASNs efficiently, it is important to adopt well-designed medium access control (MAC) protocols that prevent collisions and allow the sharing of resources between nodes efficiently. On the other hand, underwater channels suffer from a narrow bandwidth, long propagation delay, and low data rate, so existing terrestrial node pairing schemes for non orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) cannot be applied directly to underwater environments. Therefore, a multi-dimensional node pairing scheme is proposed to consider the unique underwater channel in UWASNs. Conventional NOMA schemes have considered the channel quality only in node pairing. Unlike previous schemes, the proposed scheme considers the channel gain and many other features, such as node fairness, traffic load, and the age of data packets to find the best node-pair. In addition, the sender employs a list of candidates for node-pairs rather than path loss to reduce the computational complexity. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme by considering the fairness factor with 23.8% increases in throughput, 28% decreases in latency, and 5.7% improvements in fairness at best.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.36 no.4B
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• pp.405-411
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• 2011

As the interest in ocean environment monitoring and ocean development has been increased, the need for researches on underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) and low power consuming acoustic modem for UWSN has been arisen. In this paper, we design and implement a micro-modem equipped with a tiny and omnidirectional transducer for underwater acoustic communications. In addition, we make experiments in a water tank and a pond in order to verify the performance of the developed modem in terms of supply voltage and communication distance, and analyze the results. According to the outdoor experiments, the modem can send data wirelessly in underwater at a distance of 40 meter with a data rate of 200 bps and a bit error rate of $10^{-5}$ when the supply voltage is 12 V. Due to its small size, low power consumption and omnidirectional property, it is expected that the modem which is implemented in this paper could be utilized for various applications based on UWSN.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.33-40
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• 2011

In this paper, underwater acoustic communication experiment was carried out to test a performance of single carrier digital modulation schemes. The communication experiment was performed at real sea and tested modulation schemes are ASK, FSK with non-coherent detection and QPSK with coherent detection. A modulated image data was transmitted with data rates of 600bps~3Kbps. From the results of BER of the demodulated signal, ASK and FSK show the achievable BER of $10^{-3}{\sim}10^{-4}$ without compensation techniques and QPSK show that of $10^{-4}$ with linear equalizer.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.39-48
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• 2017

CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) is promising medium access control schemes for underwater acoustic sensor networks because of its robustness against frequency-selective fading and high frequency-reuse efficiency. In this paper, we design diversity schemes of underwater CDMA transceiver for the forward and reverse links. User data are multiplexed by Walsh code and a pseudo random noise code acquisition process is added for phase error correction before decoding the user data at the receiver. Then, the diversity reception using equal gain combining and maximal ratio combining is performed in order to minimize performance degradation caused by rich multipath fading of underwater acoustic channel. We evaluated the performance of diversity transceiver through lake experiment, which was performed at Lake Kyungcheon, Mungyeong city using two transmitters and two receivers placed 460 m apart at an average depth of 40 m. The lake experiment results show that user data are recovered with error-free in both of the forward and reverse links.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.499-505
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• 2009

Main design issues for MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol in underwater sensor networks are long propagation delay caused by the low speed of sound, difficult synchronization, and energy-limited node's life. We aimed to mitigate the problems of strict synchronization and channel inefficiency of TDMA and also the throughput degradation induced by unavoidable collisions in contention based MAC protocols. This proposed protocol improved not only the energy efficiency by adopting a sleep-mode, but also the throughput by reducing collisions and increasing channel efficiency.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39C no.3
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• pp.275-281
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• 2014

Recently, the need for various underwater application systems targeting efficient resource exploration and aquatic ecosystem monitoring is rapidly increasing in littoral sea and inland waters. In this paper, we focus on the research and development of digital module of acoustic micro modem which can be used for underwater mobile communication systems and underwater sensor network systems. Specifically, a digital module of acoustic modem embedding digital signal processor is designed and implemented. On top of the developed hardware platform, physical layer frame generation and recovery and channel coding algorithms are mounted and tested in a water tank and a pond to verify its functionality and performance. According to experimental results, less than 1 percent of total computational power is consumed in the processing of frame control and convolutional code with the data rate of 1 kbps. Thus, the performance of micro modem could be improved by loading efficient baseband algorithms into the processor while maintaining the implemented hardware.