Using a digital underwater acoustic communication standard to reach a consensus in a network

What is it about?

Contributing to the effort to extend the Internet of Things (IoT) underwater, we have designed a protocol that enables individual agents in an underwater network to reach a consensus on what they think is best for the network. This is an important capability if underwater networks are to be able to communicate and cooperate effectively. We use it to enable the network to agree on how easy it is to send fast-rate data reliably from one device to another, to let the network decide on what 'language' to speak from then on.

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Photo by DeepMind on Unsplash

Photo by DeepMind on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Underwater networks will typically consist of different brands of communication equipment, preventing them from speaking their own closed-source languages across the network. If they can start by using a common open-source language, this protocol allows them to negotiate the most effective common communication protocol and parameters to work together. Unlike Wi-Fi, which uses radio signals, sound is generally used for wireless communication underwater as radio waves are quickly absorbed in water and hence have only a very short range. There is an underwater acoustic communication standard, known as JANUS, that is robust, but also very slow. So we want networks to be able to agree on a good fast-rate language as quickly as possible.