UnetStack powered acoustic modems provide extreme flexibility to the user to automate processes such as the transmission of data frames (e.g. position updates) or signals, decision making after the reception, etc. enabling a hands-off approach to test various deployment scenarios. If you are using a program or a script to transmit and receive from your software-defined open architecture acoustic modem (SDOAM), it is often good to know your location (latitude, longitude, and depth), to make decisions such as when to transmit, what power level to use, etc. This is not a big problem if your acoustic modem is deployed in a fixed location. However, if the modem is installed in a mobile underwater asset like an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), such decisions are crucial.

The Unet simulator supports various ways of simulating the motion of the simulated nodes, from simple dynamics models to completely custom functions that can generate motion updates. Let’s look at how one can go about simulating the motion of nodes in the Unet Simulator.

Acoustic modems transmit physical sound waves via a transducer, typically a piezoelectric device. Such sound emitters have an ideal resonance frequency F and a Q factor of the order of 0.3. This means that the efficient region of the frequencies it can transmit centers around the resonance frequency with a bandwidth of about 0.3 x F. Q may be higher or lower depending on the exact transducer.

It is April again, and that means it is time for the next release of UnetStack! We are excited to bring several new features to you – a new JSON event logging framework for automated analysis of multi-agent protocols, support for signal strength and ambient noise level reporting in the Unet simulator, and experimental support for Julia agents! In addition, UnetStack 3.3 also incorporates numerous enhancements, bug fixes and performance improvements.

Imagine you are developing an application for an underwater use case such as messaging or file transfer and you intend to eventually deploy the app on a network of JANUS compliant modems in the field. Or you may be developing a new routing protocol that is intended to work on a network of JANUS compliant modems. Or you might be a university Professor designing an exercise for your students to learn about underwater communications and networking.