Effective communication mechanisms in schools of submersibles are a key requirement for their meaningful deployment. Furthermore a fully distributed communication schema is preferable for reasons of reliability. The required communication form is usually many-to-many, especially omnicast [4] (or "gossiping"). All these constraints are hard to achieve at the same time in a low-bandwidth, short range communication setup. The theoretical findings in [4] and [5] are expanded and employed for the actual underwater schools communication in the Serafina project (e.g. [2], [3]). The results are reported here.

Short range, long-wave radio and optical communication links are deployed to build up and maintain a dynamical communication schedule which allows for a highly efficient exchange of all locally sampled information to all members of the school.

Paper (pdf) | other publications