Abstract
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are widely used as a cost-effective mean to carry out underwater missions. During long-term missions, AUVs may collect large amounts of data that usually needs to be sent to shore. An AUV may have to travel several kilometers before reaching an area of interest near the seafloor, thus surfacing is unpractical for most cases. Long-range underwater communications rely mostly on acoustic communications, which are characterized by very low bitrates, thus making the transfer of large amounts of data too slow. GROW is a novel solution for long-range, high bitrate underwater wireless communications between a survey unit (e.g., deep sea lander, AUV) and a central station at surface. GROW combines AUVs as data mules, short-range high bitrate wireless RF or optical communications, and long-range low bitrate acoustic communications for control. In this paper we present the Underwater Data Muling Protocol (UDMP), a communications protocol that enables the control and the scheduling of the Data Mule Units within the GROW framework. Experimental results obtained using an underwater testbed show that the use of UDMP and data mules can outperform acoustic communications, achieving equivalent throughput up to 150 times higher within the typical range of operation of the latter.

Abstract
The use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) is increasingly seen as a cost-effective way to carry out underwater missions. Due to their long endurance and set of sensors onboard, AUVs may collect large amounts of data, in the order of Gbytes, which need to be transferred to shore. State of the art wireless technologies suffer either from low bitrates or limited range. Since surfacing may be unpractical, especially for deep sea operations, long-range underwater data transfer is limited to the use of low bitrate acoustic communications, precluding the timely transmission of large amounts of data. The use of data mules combined with short-range, high bitrate RF or optical communications has been proposed as a solution to overcome the problem. In this paper we describe the implementation and validation of UDMSim, a simulation platform for underwater data muling oriented systems that combines an AUV simulator and the Network Simulator 3 (ns-3). The results presented in this paper show a good match between UDMSim, a theoretical model, and the experimental results obtained by using an underwater testbed when no localization errors exist. When these errors are present, the simulator is able to reproduce the navigation of AUVs that act as data mules, adjust the throughput, and simulate the signal and connection losses that the theoretical model can not predict, but that will occur in reality. UDMSim is made available to the community to support easy and faster evaluation of data muling oriented underwater communications solutions, and enable offline replication of real world experiments.