UD-TDMA: A distributed TDMA protocol for underwater acoustic sensor network

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed and robust time slot scheduling algorithm, which is suitable for underwater acoustic sensor network (UASN). The information of nodes' 2-hop neighbors is needed to be collected and then be used to calculate nodes' initial time slot by a distributed algorithm. A maximal independent set is formed by the nodes which were assigned with the same initial slot. Some theorems were proved to reveal that in an interference graph the size of this maximal independent set is at least of the size of the maximum independent set of the nodes. The simulation compares UD-TDMA with other three MAC protocols. The results show that the proposed protocol is effective in the UASN with random deployment, especially in high-density underwater acoustic sensor network.