A Cooperative MAC Scheduling Scheme for Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

The long propagation delay in underwater acoustic sensor networks renders existing media access control (MAC) protocols for terrestrial wireless networks undesirable. In this paper, we propose a new cooperative MAC protocol for underwater sensor networks that is used to detect objects and monitoring the environment. Our proposed MAC protocol tries to prevent data collisions through short term scheduling among neighbor nodes with exchange of short data message. By adapting the all sensor nodes to the transmitting schedules in which time is optimized we can minimize the collision rate between nodes. Through simulations, we show our proposed protocol can minimize data collisions and not only offers a higher throughput, but also indicates a better end-to-end delay.