UnetStack 3.0, released at the end of September last year, was a major milestone in the evolution of UnetStack. We are now excited to release the next installment of features and performance enhancements in the form of UnetStack 3.1. Apart from performance enhancements and bug fixes, UnetStack 3.1 brings significant feature upgrades to the link, ranging and routing services, new concepts such as wormholes and distributed spatial diversity, a new fragmentation-reassembly framework, and improved user interface in the form of dashboards.

Spatial diversity techniques that are used in terrestrial networks usually utilize multiple antennas on the same device to improve link quality and reliability. Similarly, having multiple hydrophones/transducers on the same underwater node might help with the same but comes with the cost of a significant increase in the size due to the spatial separation that might be needed between transducers. Can we exploit a similar technique to make underwater wireless networks faster and more reliable and make that long-range communication link “just work”? With the capability to exploit distributed spatial diversity, yes you can!

MATLAB is widely known as a high-quality environment for any work that invlolves arrays, matrices or linear algebra and hence is extremely useful for scientific computing. If you are a MATLAB user and wondering if you can interact with the modems running UnetStack, the answer is yes. In this blog, you will learn how to:

Since the first public release of UnetStack in 2013, we have been steadily adding features and improving ease of use. UnetStack3 is a major milestone in the evolution of UnetStack, debuting a software-defined modem that can run on your laptop or on an embedded computer, and adding new features such as web-based development tools, easy-to-use application programming interfaces (APIs), JANUS support, support for languages such as Python, Javascript, C and Julia, higher performance networking protocols, and many under-the-hood architectural enhancements. Alongside UnetStack3, we also released the Unet handbook – a resource to help you master underwater networking and harness the full power of UnetStack3.

Accessing current simulation count Accessing platform time and clock time Suppressing simulation progress Calculating distances between nodes Programmatically stopping a simulation Setting log level of the simulation agent Specifying relative paths for files Working with GPS coordinates Distributing nodes randomly Encoding and decoding PDUs Using MATLAB to plot results Using a visual debugger in agent development