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Electronics
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6 November 2019

Downlink Power Allocation Strategy for Next-Generation Underwater Acoustic Communications Networks

and
1
Department of Electronic Engineering, Inha University, Incheon 22212, Korea
2
Department of Electrical Engineering, Gomal University, Dera Ismail Khan 29200, Pakistan
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
This article belongs to the Special Issue Underwater Communication and Networking Systems

Abstract

The increasing interest in next-generation underwater acoustic communications networks is due to vast investigation of oceans for oceanography, commercial operations in maritime areas, military surveillance, and more. A surface buoy or underwater base station controller (UBSC) communicates with either transceivers or underwater base stations (UBSs) via acoustic links. Transceivers further communicate with underwater sensor nodes using acoustic links. In this paper, we employ a downlink (DL) power allocation (PA) strategy using an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) technique for underwater acoustic communications (UAC) networks. First, we present an approach to power offsets using three kinds of pilot spacing and apply the power boosting (PB) concept on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols for the UAC network. Secondly, we draw the block error rate (BLER) curves from link-level simulation (LLS) and analyze the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for both PA and non-PA strategies. Lastly, we adopt the best PB for system-level simulation (SLS) and compare the throughput and outage performance for PA and non-PA strategies. Hence, the simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the DL PA strategy for UAC networks.

1. Introduction

Next-generation underwater acoustic communications (UAC) networks have the capability to observe and explore the aquatic environment. Therefore, UAC networks are widely considered for long-distance underwater communications. Quality of service (QoS) requirements are needed in order to fill military and scientific data collections about the ocean floor. However, it is difficult to manage UAC channel properties, such as delay and Doppler spread, which cause severe fading [1,2,3,4,5].
Compared with the terrestrial channel model, the UAC channel model poses difficult challenges. In addition, bandwidth availability is the most prominent challenge in UAC networks. Therefore, cellular and frequency-reuse concepts are more tempting when trying to improve the coverage and capacity of UAC networks [6,7,8]. In this paper, we consider a cellular type of UAC network architecture and employ a downlink (DL) power allocation (PA) strategy to analyze system throughput and outage performance in a system-level simulation (SLS). Evaluation of a link-level simulation (LLS) is done by measuring the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) versus block error rate (BLER) [9,10,11,12,13].
Research has been proposed to assess the features of UAC networks in the existing literature. However, features related to UAC networks still need to be addressed on an emergent basis, including consideration of complicated scenarios such as terrestrial cellular networks [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. The existing works related to underwater communication have been considered simple network architectures and have been mostly focus on the assessment of underwater channel model and routing protocols [28,29,30,31]. In order to fill this gap, we consider the complicated scenarios associated with terrestrial networks and employ the downlink power allocation strategy for the UAC networks. Many researchers who have previously worked on UAC power allocation issues have not considered the associated complicated scenarios.

1.1. Differences in System Methodologies in the Literature

In a study by Cheon and Cho (2017) [32], an equal transmission power control scheme was applied to the clustered based network approach for UAC networks. The major difference in this study is that we employ the power allocation scheme for non-orthogonal multiple access while utilizing the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technique for UAC networks. In [33], the authors investigated the power allocation strategy for energy harvesting in UAC networks. They considered two scenarios for knowing the channel state information and applied stochastic dynamic programming to find the optimal power allocation for UAC networks. The major difference in this study is that we adopt the power allocation for energy harvesting in the UAC network. In [34], the authors jointly utilized the power and frequency allocation strategy to minimize the energy consumption of UAC networks. The major difference in this study is that we select the proper center frequency, bandwidth, and transmission using the routing protocols. Hence, the different approaches and system design in the existing works [32,33,34] resulted in different system parameters. Therefore, it is very difficult to compare the proposed DL PA strategy with other research. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to present the downlink power allocation issues using the power allocation strategy for UAC networks.

1.2. Main Contributions

The main contributions of this paper are as follows:
  • The DL PA strategy is employed using an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) technique for UAC networks.
  • The power offset approach is presented using three kinds of pilot spacing and by applying the power boosting (PB) concept on OFDM symbols for a UAC network.
  • BLER results are drawn from the LLS, and we analyze the SNR for PA and non-PA strategies.
  • The best PB case is adopted for the SLS, and we compare throughput and outage performance for PA and non-PA strategies.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we provide the system model for UAC networks. In Section 3, we discuss the proposed DL PA strategy in detail for UAC networks. In Section 4, the performance of the proposed DL PA strategy is assessed by using the LLS and SLS results from the UAC network. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 5.

2. System Model for UAC Networks

We built MATLAB-based LLS and SLS platforms and employed the DL power allocation strategy for the next-generation UAC networks by referring the terrestrial cellular network communication approaches [6,7,8]. This work is a continuation of our previous work in [15] where we analyzed effective SNR mapping and link adaptation strategies for UAC networks. Therefore, we did not utilize common network simulators, for example DESERT under NS2.

2.1. Network Layout

We adopted the cellular concept in this paper [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21], which is based on one-tier cellular structure, as shown in Figure 1. The red circles and green squares represent the underwater base station controllers (UBSCs) and underwater base stations (UBSs), respectively. The UBSCs were separated from each other based on a 40 km intersite distance. The center cell was the region of interest, which is highlighted in yellow in Figure 1. Three UBSs were connected to the UBSC via acoustic communications linked with fixed distances, i.e., short (1 km), medium (5 km), and long (10 km) [15]. The scenario of acoustic communication between the UBSC and UBS was quite similar to terrestrial cellular communication, such as base stations and users, respectively. Therefore, the UBSs, which existed in the region of interest, could be considered to be the only users or receivers where the scheduling, outage, and throughput calculations were performed while the transmitters and receivers in first tier could be considered to be the interference providing nodes. Hence, the downlink power allocation strategy was implemented based on the scenario in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Cellular layout for an underwater acoustic communications (UAC) network. UBSC: underwater base station controllers; UBS: underwater base stations.

2.2. Channel Model

Transmission Loss and Ambient Noise: The core difference between a terrestrial network and an underwater network is the underwater channel model. We chose the most representative transmission loss model, which has been used in a lot of previous research [3,29,30,31].
Fading Channel Model: We utilized the twelve-path Rician channel in the south sea by conducting an experiment for data acquisition from 9 December 2017 to 13 December 2017. The experiment was conducted in Korea’s Pohang Sea, Geoje City, Gyeongsangnamdo [15]. We drew the channel impulse response (CIR) of the south sea channel, as shown in Figure 2. There were a total of 54 symbols in one frame. We drew discrete and continuous CIRs for different frames, as shown in Figure 2a,b, respectively.
Figure 2. Discrete and continuous CIRs for different frames: (a) discrete CIRs; (b) continuous CIRs.
Figure 2 shows that the behavior of the UAC south sea channel is quite similar to the statistical channel models in terrestrial scenarios (e.g., Veh. A, Veh. B, Winner II, etc.). The example behavior of terrestrial Winner II (scenario B1) channel model is shown in Figure 3 [35]. Hence, the delay versus the amplitude of discrete curves shows similar behavior for UAC south fading channel model and terrestrial Winner II fading channel model in Figure 2 and Figure 3, respectively.
Figure 3. Excess delay versus normalized power of terrestrial winner II (B1 scenario) channel model.
At LLS, we draw the BLER curves by considering the useful modulation and coding scheme levels [15], as shown in Figure 4. The corresponding look-up table is listed in Table 1. We took the SNR values at 10% of the BLER curves for the nine modulation and coding scheme levels and utilized these values in SLS for assessing the DL power allocation strategy.
Figure 4. Final MCS (Modulation and Coding Scheme) levels.
Table 1. Channel quality indicator (CQI) Table for MCS levels of adaptive modulation in a UAC network system-level simulation (SLS).

5. Conclusions

This paper analyzed a downlink power allocation strategy for next-generation UAC networks. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore power allocation issues in UAC networks. In this paper, we introduced the power offset concept based on three kinds of pilot spacing for UAC networks. Power boosting was employed on the CRS, and we drew BLER LLS results to compare PA and non-PA strategies. Moreover, we chose the best PA, and utilized a SNR at 10% of the BLER in the SLS via EESM link-to-system mapping. Finally, we drew throughput and the outage performance to analyze the effectiveness of the power allocation strategy. From Figure 8 and Figure 9, we validated the downlink power allocation strategy as working effectively in UAC networks.

Author Contributions

I.A. proposed the downlink power allocation strategy for UAC networks. He presented the approach to power offset using three kinds of pilot spacing and applied the PB concept to OFDM symbols for the UAC network. He drew the BLER curves from LLS and analyzed the SNR for PA and non-PA strategies. Finally, he chose the best PB for SLS and compared throughput and outage performance for PA and non-PA. K.C. was the technical leader for this manuscript. He suggested all the technical issues for the proposed downlink power allocation strategy for UAC networks and for the simulations. In addition, he corrected the simulation methodology in this manuscript and corrected mistakes in the simulation environment, as well as in the structure of the overall manuscript.

Funding

This research was supported as part of the project titled “Development of Distributed Underwater Monitoring and Control Networks”, which was funded by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, Korea.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare they have no conflicts of interest.

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