A Comprehensive Review on Result Extraction and Analysis in Underwater Network Simulators: A UnetStack Perspective

Abstract

Simulation of Underwater Acoustic Sensor networks (UASNs) enables researchers to test and verify the protocols or techniques developed quickly and inexpensively. Many underwater network simulation platforms are available such as NS-2 Miracle, Aqua-Net, DESERT, SUNSET, and UnetStack. After conducting a simulation, any simulation platform typically generates a simulation trace or log file. This file has to be processed further to analyze the network performance. However, this requires writing additional scripts or programs, making processing trace files laborious, time-consuming, and prone to error. Thus, a tool that can automate this task of processing the simulation traces and extracting the required result for network performance analysis would help the researchers to focus on developing and validating their work. A few automated tools are available for specific simulators, but no such automated tool is available for the UnetStack simulator. UnetStack is a popular industry standard underwater network simulation platform used in research and development. The community edition is freely and publicly available for research and academia. This work reviews the process and the tools for result extraction and analysis. Furthermore, the work discusses details on available methods in UnetStack for extracting and analyzing the results with their limitations and the scope for building an automated trace analysis tool and finally gives concluding remarks. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.