A Simulator for Microcontroller-based Underwater Ultrasonic Communications
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Date
2006-08-04
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Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to aid in the development of the RAPTEX project. The RAPTEX project deals with designing efficient communication protocols for underwater telemetry and sensor networks.
Underwater telemetry is used to track crabs, initially in shallow water and later in marine environments. Ultrasonic waves are used for such underwater telemetry. The ultrasonic waves are affected by various phenomena as they pass through water. These phenomena include attenuation, multi-path fading, noise, etc. A small microcontroller based transmitter will be placed on the back of the crab allowing the telemetry data to be transmitted. The microcontroller will directly drive an ultrasonic transducer through a Digital to Analog Converter to output a modulated carrier wave. It is necessary to simulate the communication between the microcontroller based transmitter and the receiver before testing this system in the real-world environment.
The purpose of the simulation is two-fold. It helps to validate the design and it also helps in verifying the end-to-end communication of the system. This becomes important as more and more higher layer protocols are added to the RAPTEX project. Since the simulation environment has control over all the parts of the communication system; viz. the transmitter (based on the AVR microcontroller), the channel and the receiver, it is possible to inspect the flow of data at any point by adding suitable taps.
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multipath fading, propagation losses, noise, ultrasonic, communication, microcontroller, avrora, simulator, underwater
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Degree
MS
Discipline
Computer Engineering
