Edinburgh Napier University

  Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UANs) have emerged as a promising technology which can be applied in many areas such as military and civil in recent years. Among these applications, the communication between the devices is crucial for providing the better service to the users. To facilitate the communication, effective communication approaches need to be developed, however, underwater communication may pose more challenges than terrestrial communication due to the unique characteristics of underwater acoustic channel, such as the high latency and the low bandwidth. In this paper, the context-aware technology is introduced to the design of the communication approach, and the context-aware communication approach for the UAN (CACA-UAN) is proposed which consists of an ontology-based context-aware modeling approach for the UAN, context-aware device association and context-aware communication mechanism to improve the overall performance of the underwater communication system. We have demonstrated that the proposed CACA-UAN can reduce the transmission latency and jitter of communication, and increase the efficiency and reliability of the underwater communication system.