A New Resource Allocation Protocol for the Backhaul of Underwater Cellular Wireless Networks

Abstract

In this paper, an underwater base station initiating (UBSI) resource allocation is proposed for underwater cellular wireless networks (UCWNs), which is a new approach to determine the backhaul capacity of underwater base stations (UBSs). This backhaul is a communication link from a UBS to a UBS controller (UBSC). Contrary to conventional resource allocation protocols, a UBS initiates to re-determine its backhaul capacity for itself according to its queue status; it releases a portion of its backhaul capacity in the case of experiencing resource under-utilization, and also requests additional backhaul capacity to the UBSC if packet drops are caused due to queue-overflow. This protocol can be appropriate and efficient to the underwater backhaul link where the transmission rate is quite low and the latency is unneglectable. In order to investigate the applicability of the UBSI resource allocation protocol to the UCWN, its performance is extensively analyzed via system level simulations. In our analysis, considered performance measures include average packet drop rate, average resource utilization, average message overhead, and the reserved capacity of the UBSC. In particular, the simulation results show that our proposed protocol not only utilizes most of the given backhaul capacity (more than 90 percent of resource utilization on the average), but also reduces controlling message overheads induced by resource allocation (less than 2 controlling messages on the average). It is expected that the simulation results and analysis in this paper can be used as operating guidelines to apply our new resource allocation protocol for the UCWN.