Interference-Constrained Scheduling of a Cognitive Multi-hop Underwater Acoustic Network

Abstract: This paper investigates optimal scheduling for a cognitive multi-hop underwater acoustic network with a primary user interference constraint. The network consists of primary and secondary users, with multi-hop transmission adopted for both user types to provide reliable communications. Critical characteristics of underwater acoustic channels, including significant propagation delay, distance-and-frequency dependent attenuation, half-duplex modem, and inter-hop interference, are taken into account in the design and analysis. In particular, time-slot allocation is found to be more effective than frequency-slot allocation due to the underwater channel model. The goal of the network scheduling problem is to maximize the end-to-end throughput of the overall system while limiting the throughput loss of primary users. Both centralized and decentralized approaches are considered. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) framework is applied to formulate the optimization problem, and an optimal dynamic programming algorithm is derived. However, the optimal dynamic programming solution is computationally intractable. Key properties are shown for the objective function, enabling the design of approximate schemes with significant complexity reduction. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes significantly increase system throughput while maintaining the primary throughput loss constraint. Under certain traffic conditions, the throughput gain over frequency-slot allocation schemes can be as high as 50%.