UA-MAC: An Underwater Acoustic Channel Access Method for Dense Mobile Underwater Sensor Networks. (19th February 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Lv, Chao; Wang, Shuo; Tan, Min; Chen, Lan
• Is Part Of: International journal of distributed sensor networks. Volume 10:Number 2(2014)
• Publication Date: 2014-02-19
• Subjects: Sensor networks -- Periodicals; Intelligent agents (Computer software) -- Periodicals; Multisensor data fusion -- Periodicals; 681.2
• DOI: 10.1155/2014/374028
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1550-1329

Abstract

The long propagation delay and low data rate characteristics of acoustic communication attach many challenges to underwater wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a TDMA based underwater acoustic channel access method (UA-MAC) is proposed mainly to improve channel utilization in dense mobile underwater wireless sensor networks (MUWSN). In UA-MAC, the time slot of each node accessing to the acoustic channel is assigned according to a preverified template, which aims to minimize amount of slots so as to decrease the end-to-end delay. In addition, a piggyback based protocol is implemented to synchronize and schedule the network. The simulation results show that UA-MAC is much superior to common TDMA in throughput, channel utilization, and end-to-end delay especially in dense scenario. Based on the low-power low-cost underwater acoustic nodes we developed, the experiments were carried out to validate the proposed UA-MAC.