A Focus on Comparative Analysis: Key Findings of MAC Protocols for Underwater Acoustic Communication According to Network Topology

Abstract

AbstractUnderwater acoustic communication can be applicable to many fields, such as oceanic data collection, undersea exploration and development, disaster prevention, underwater environmental monitoring and tactical surveillance. However, it has several challenges to design underwater acoustic sensor networks, for instance, limited bandwidth, multi-path, padding, long propagation delay, high bit error, temporary losses of connectivity and limited battery power. Nowadays many studies are being conducted to overcome abovementioned problems. In this paper, various MAC protocols for underwater acoustic communication are classified by network topology, one is cluster head based MAC protocols and the other one is ad-hoc based MAC protocols. In recent researches, there were not comparative analyses of MAC protocols for underwater acoustic communication according to network topology. So, we summarize and analyze these protocols through comparing each other with some factors. In the future, MAC protocols for underwater acoustic communication will be designed with consideration for each advantage of cluster head and ad-hoc MAC protocols, considering the mobility of nodes to improve underwater acoustic communication, which can be applied to lots of underwater applications.KeywordsUnderwater acoustic communicationMAC protocolNetwork topologyCluster-headAd-hoc