Schedule Based Collision Free MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Wireless Sensor Networks

ABSTRACT

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UW-ASNs) utilize acoustic waves as a means of communications and are, accordingly, faced with problems of high propagation delays, low bandwidth, and significant transmission power consumption. This unique situation makes the existing MAC protocols designed for radio networks either unpractical or not energy efficient for underwater sensor networks. To this end, we propose a schedule based MAC protocol that uses scheduling algorithms both at sender and receiver nodes. Minimal number of overhead control messages and novel scheduling strategy of the proposed protocol allows increasing the number of concurrent transmissions within a network while excluding the likelihood of data packets collisions.