An SDN Architecture for AUV-Based Underwater Wireless Networks to Enable Cooperative Underwater Search

With the emergence of new underwater ICTs, UWNs based on AUV have become the mainstream technology for underwater search tasks. These advanced underwater searching technologies are leading to smart perceptual ocean technologies. However, to support precise multi-AUVs cooperative underwater search and provide intelligent data collection and data transfer among the AUVs, one of the challenging issues is to design a scalable network architecture capable of fine-grained control and smart underwater data routing. In this article, we employ the paradigm of SDN technology and propose an SDN-based underwater cooperative searching framework for AUV-based UWNs. In particular, we propose a software-defined beaconing framework integrating two categories of defined beacons to synchronize network information and execute network operations. Based on the software-defined beaconing framework, we introduce the USBL positioning system and propose a hierarchical localization framework to localize/track each AUV in the network. Then, we utilize the potential field theory to model the multi-AUV cooperative operation, leading to a cooperative control framework. Finally, to guarantee the potential data transfer among the AUVs, we also propose a software-defined hybrid data transfer scheduling framework. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme performs more efficiently than some existing schemes especially the distributed control policy. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61971206; the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, No. 2019M661096; and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, No. DUT19ZD206, and No. DUT20RC(5)016.