Abstract
TDMA protocols have attracted a lot of attention for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWSNs), because of the unique characteristics of acoustic signal propagation such as great energy consumption in transmission, long propagation delay and long communication range. Previous TDMA protocols all allocated transmission time to nodes based on discrete time slots. This paper proposes an efficient continuous time scheduling TDMA protocol (ECS) for UWSNs, including the continuous time based and sender oriented conflict analysis model, the transmission moment allocation algorithm and the distributed topology maintenance algorithm. Simulation results confirm that ECS improves network throughput by 20% on average, compared to existing MAC protocols.
Highlights
Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWSNs) have a promising future in the area of information collection with more and more applications in recent years, such as ocean environmental surveillance, resource exploration and disaster prevention [1,2,3]
Unlike terrestrial sensor nodes that rely on radio waves to communicate with each other, underwater sensor nodes utilize acoustic waves to transmit data, which constitutes a significant difference between underwater sensor networks and terrestrial sensor networks (TSNs)
Continuous allocation of transmitting moments brings new challenges to the MAC protocol design: the local conflict graphs (LCG) of the nodes have to be constructed based on continuous time and the transmission forbidden time of each node should be calculated as a continuous period
Summary
Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWSNs) have a promising future in the area of information collection with more and more applications in recent years, such as ocean environmental surveillance, resource exploration and disaster prevention [1,2,3]. Continuous allocation of transmitting moments brings new challenges to the MAC protocol design: the local conflict graphs (LCG) of the nodes have to be constructed based on continuous time and the transmission forbidden time of each node should be calculated as a continuous period. We propose the Efficient Continuous Scheduling algorithm (ECS) to solve the MAC problem of UWSNs. ECS contains three parts: a transmitting forbidden time calculation algorithm based on nodes‟ local conflict graph (LCG), an allocation algorithm for nodes to decide their own transmitting moment based on a group of heuristic rules, and a distributed maintenance problem to solve the situations of neighbor death or joining of new nodes.
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