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.

In my previous article on developing your own acoustic PHY, I showed you how to develop your own acoustic PHY in Groovy or Java. However, Groovy and Java are not well suited to writing complex mathematical algorithms. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could write the algorithms in Julia instead? In this article, we take the custom PHY we developed previously, and replace the signal processing methods with the Julia equivalents. The technique applies not just to PHY agents, and so this article should get you started on leveraging Julia in any UnetStack agents (or for that matter in any Java or Groovy code).

UnetStack enables software-defined open architecture modems (SDOAMs). While such modems come with one or more implementations of physical layers (PHY) for your use, there are times when you may wish to develop your own PHY. Perhaps it is because you have a special environment that demands a unique PHY, or because you want to interoperate with another modem. Or maybe you just want to try your hands at implementing communication techniques. Whatever the reason, I have often been asked for advice on how to go about writing a custom PHY. In this article, I will walk you through the process of implementing a simple PHY from scratch.

Over the past year, I’ve fallen in love with Julia. Now most of my acoustics, signal processing, data analysis, and machine learning research is done in Julia. So it’s natural for me to ask how I can use Julia with UnetStack, as a lot of that research eventually finds its way into underwater networks via UnetStack. In this 2-part article, we’ll explore 2 different ways to get Julia and UnetStack to work seamlessly together.