Abstract
A hybrid optical-acoustic underwater wireless sensor network (OA-UWSN) was proposed to solve the problem of high-speed transmission of real-time video and images in marine information detection. This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient contention-based media access control (MAC) protocol (OA-CMAC) for the OA-UWSN. Based on optical-acoustic fusion technology, our proposed OA-CMAC combines the postponed access mechanism in carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) and multiplexing-based spatial division multiple access (SDMA) technology to achieve high-speed and real-time data transmission. The protocol first performs an acoustic handshake to obtain the location information of a transceiver node, ensuring that the channel is idle. Otherwise, it performs postponed access and waits for the next time slot to contend for the channel again. Then, an optical handshake is performed to detect whether the channel condition satisfies the optical transmission, and beam alignment is performed at the same time. Finally, the nodes transmit data using optical communication. If the channel conditions do not meet the requirements for optical communication, a small amount of data with high priority is transmitted through acoustic communication. An evaluation of the proposed MAC protocol was performed with OMNeT++ simulations. The results showed that when the optical handshaking success ratio was greater than 50%, compared to the O-A handshake protocol in the literature, our protocol could result in doubled throughput. Due to the low energy consumption of optical communication, the node’s lifetime is 30% longer than that of pure acoustic communication, greatly reducing the network operation cost. Therefore, it is suitable for large-scale underwater sensor networks with high loads.
Highlights
Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN) are typically used to monitor underwater environments and collect underwater data, such as marine data collection, pollution monitoring, marine exploration, assisted navigation, and tactical monitoring [1,2,3,4]
The performance evaluation of the proposed media access control (MAC) protocol of the optical-acoustic underwater wireless sensor network (OA-UWSN) was conducted on the OMNeT++ platform
The optical-acoustic competitive MAC protocol (OA-CMAC) protocol was compared to the OA-MAC [36] protocol based on the OA-UWSN proposed by our research group
Summary
Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN) are typically used to monitor underwater environments and collect underwater data, such as marine data collection, pollution monitoring, marine exploration, assisted navigation, and tactical monitoring [1,2,3,4]. Three ways are normally employed to transfer data between UWSN nodes, namely, underwater electromagnetic communication, underwater acoustic communication, and underwater optical. Underwater acoustic communication is the most mature technique, because acoustic signal attenuation underwater is small and can achieve a relatively long-distance transmission (usually used for UWSN data transmission), but the bandwidth of acoustic communication is narrow and the delay is long, which is not suitable for large-capacity data transmission such as images and video [7]. Underwater optical communication has the advantages of high speed and low power consumption [8], and the attenuation of underwater blue-green light is relatively low, enabling underwater short-distance and large-capacity data transmission [9]. The routing algorithm of the design in Reference [12]
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