A Two-way-data MAC Protocol Based on MACAW for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Abstract

The hostile underwater channel condition poses challenges in the research of underwater acoustic network, especially the characteristics of long propagation delay and limited bandwidth make MAC protocol poor performance. In this paper, a new asynchronous MAC protocol, Two-way-data MAC protocol based on MACAW (TWD-MACAW) for underwater acoustic networks was proposed. In TWD-MACAW protocol, the source and destination nodes pair send data packet to each other during a handshaking loop. Furthermore, whether the node should go in quiet state and how long the quiet time are determined by the actual propagation delay between nodes in the TWD-MACAW. It improves the efficiency of handshaking protocols and reduces the waste of too long quiet time. The simulations based on TWDMACAW protocol were studied. The results show that our TWD-MACAW protocol is able to achieve much higher throughput, lower average delay and lower protocol overhead than the original MACAW protocol.