Abstract
In this article, we study the medium access control (MAC) problem in underwater wireless acoustic networks. We explore the random access and handshaking (i.e., RTS/CTS) techniques in both single-channel and multi-channel network scenarios. We model and analyze these two approaches, and conduct extensive simulations to study their performance in various network conditions. Based on our results, we observe that the performance of both approaches are affected by many factors such as data rate, propagation delay and packet size. Our results show that the RTS/CTS approach is more suitable for dense networks with high date rate, whereas the random access approach is preferred in sparse networks with low data rate. Our results also demonstrate that multi-channel techniques can potentially help us combat the long delay feature of underwater acoustic channels. However, uncoordinated random channel access cannot fully exploit the advantages of the multi-channel network settings and it performs even worse than the single-channel random access protocol. Only with careful design and coordination such as multi-channel access with RTS/CTS handshaking process, can multi-channel MAC protocols greatly improve the system performance. We believe that this study will provide useful guidelines for efficient MAC design in underwater wireless acoustic networks.
Highlights
There has been a rapidly growing interest in monitoring underwater environments for scientific exploration, commercial exploitation, and coastline protection
Due to the long propagation delay of acoustic channels, directly adapting the medium access control (MAC) protocols designed for terrestrial radio networks to underwater environments would be very inefficient
Upon receiving the CTS message, the sender will send out its data packet on the selected data channel. Through this RTS/CTS exchange process, overhearing neighbors will know this transmission event and the used data channeld. This multi-channel with RTS/CTS protocol is similar to the multi-channel MAC protocol presented in [35], which is for terrestrial wireless networks and ignores the signal propagation delay
Summary
There has been a rapidly growing interest in monitoring underwater environments for scientific exploration, commercial exploitation, and coastline protection. We investigate the two key techniques: random access and handshaking (employed by contention-based protocols) for long-delay underwater acoustic networks. Recent research in terrestrial radio networks on multi-channel MAC protocols, which use multiple channels in parallel for data transmissions, show us that such a parallelism can greatly improve the network throughput, decrease channel access delay and lower energy consumption [32,33,34,35]. In the rest of this article, we will quantitatively study the two schemes: random access and RTS/CTS in both single-channel and multi-channel network scenarios.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
