A bidirectional TDMA protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Abstract

To improve the channel efficiency, a bidirectional TDMA protocol is proposed for UWASNs in the paper. In proposed protocol, each time slot is divided into two parts, the DATA transmission/reception part and the ACK transmission/reception part. Two neighboring nodes exchange their packets by transmitting in the transmission part simultaneously and receiving at the reception part. Hence, by utilizing the characteristic of the long propagation delay in UWASNs subtly, only one time slot is used when two nodes exchange their information. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol can achieve a higher throughput and a lower transmission delay.