Abstract
The transmission speed of acoustic waves in water is much slower than that of radio waves in terrestrial wireless sensor networks. Thus, the propagation delay in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASN) is much greater. Longer propagation delay leads to complicated communication and collision problems. To solve collision problems, some studies have proposed waiting mechanisms; however, long waiting mechanisms result in low bandwidth utilization. To improve throughput, this study proposes a slotted medium access control protocol to enhance bandwidth utilization in UASNs. The proposed mechanism increases communication by exploiting temporal and spatial resources that are typically idle in order to protect communication against interference. By reducing wait time, network performance and energy consumption can be improved. A performance evaluation demonstrates that when the data packets are large or sensor deployment is dense, the energy consumption of proposed protocol is less than that of existing protocols as well as the throughput is higher than that of existing protocols.
Highlights
With the rapid development of sensor network technologies, underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have recently received increasing attention [1,2,3,4,5]
UASN technologies are used in various applications such as pollution monitoring, detection of submarines, and disaster warning
The speed varied does not affect the implementation of proposed mechanism because the mechanism considers the propagation delay time among sensors that is more practical while considering collisions for stably related propagation delays
Summary
With the rapid development of sensor network technologies, underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have recently received increasing attention [1,2,3,4,5]. Because radio signals cannot be transmitted over a long distance in water, acoustic waveforms are used in underwater transmissions [4,5]. The sound speed in the water is 1.5 km/s and the propagation delay is 0.67 s/km. The sound speed and maximum transmission distance both depend on the water column, temperature, and the center frequency of the signal. The speed varied does not affect the implementation of proposed mechanism because the mechanism considers the propagation delay time among sensors that is more practical while considering collisions for stably related propagation delays. The sensors maintain the propagation delays of communicable neighbors via listening time information in the received packets. Long propagation delay leads to more complicated collision problems than those using radiofrequency methods [1,2,3,6]
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