UMMAC: A multi-channel MAC protocol for underwater acoustic networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocol, named underwater multi-channel MAC protocol (UMMAC), for underwater acoustic networks (UANs). UMMAC is a split phase and reservation based multi-channel MAC protocol which enables hosts to utilize multiple channels via a channel allocation and power control algorithm (CAPC). In UM-MAC, channel information of neighboring nodes is gathered via exchange of control packets. With such information, UMMAC allows for as many parallel transmissions as possible while avoiding using extra time slot for channel negotiation. By running CAPC algorithm, which aims at maximizing the network's capacity, users can allocate their transmission power and channels in a distributed way. The advantages of the proposed protocol are threefold: 1) Only one transceiver is needed for each node; 2) based on CAPC, hosts are coordinated to negotiate the channels and control power in a distributed way; 3) comparing with existing RTS/CTS MAC protocols, UMMAC do not introduce new overhead for channel negotiation. Simulation results show that UMMAC outperforms Slotted floor acquisition multiple access (FAMA) and multi-channel MAC (MMAC) in terms of network goodput (50% and 17% respectively in a certain scenario). Furthermore, UMMAC can lower the end-to-end delay and achieves a lower energy consumption compared to Slotted FAMA and MMAC.