Underwater Acoustic Communications: Optimizing Data Packet Size With Respect to Throughput Efficiency, BER, and Energy Efficiency

The authors of this paper embarked on a research to investigate the relationships between the
data packet size and the three important performance metrics namely, bit error rate (BER), throughput
efficiency, and energy efficiency in underwater acoustic (UWA) communications. The investigations were
conducted via simulations on the ns2 simulator with its MIRACLE (Multi-InteRfAce Cross-Layer Extension
library) package. Based on the results of the simulation the authors have proposed an algorithm/framework to
determine the optimal packet size for UWA data transmission. Each of the three metrics are dealt with
separately in the context of packet size to produce a data set or a look-up graph that can be indexed/consulted
by the algorithm to compute an optimal packet size.