Automatic Network Slicing for Multi-Mode Internet of Underwater Things (MM-IoUT)

In recent years, many underwater communication applications have been proposed and tested, leading to the Internet of underwater things (IoUT) concept. In the IoUT, sensors may be deployed individually on sea surface and seabed as well as in water at different depths. They also may be integrated into underwater items such as fish, plants, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs), and divers. Depending on the application, different connectivity requirements must be satisfied such as data rate, latency, and reliability. However, the underwater communication channels pose a significant challenge to meet these requirements. To accommodate various applications with different service level agreements (SLAs), a multimode (acoustic, optical, and magnetic induction (MI)) communication system is proposed to take advantage of the modes' complementary features. Furthermore, an automatic network slicing (ANS) solution is proposed to provide globally optimized resource management, enhanced quality of service (QoS), simplified network operation, reduced deployment cost, and functional isolation of services. Taking the channel characteristics of the acoustic, optical, and MI communication modes into consideration, an optimization problem is formulated and solved for multimode IoUT (MM-IoUT) to enable admission control, routing, and dynamic resource allocation based on the different SLAs. Numerical analysis is conducted to verify the proposed solution and evaluate its performance.