A Concurrent MAC Protocol with Master-Slave Transmission for Multi-hop Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

There is a clear trend towards the application of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). However, in view of its inherent terrible characteristics such as long propagation delay, poor channel reliability, and limited battery power, it is of great challenges on the design of MAC protocol for UASNs. Many researcheres have attempted to optimize the transmission strategy to increase the saturation network throughput of UASNs, yet they ignored the tradeoff is excessive energy consumption. Aimed at the multi-hop network topology in UASNs, in this paper, we propose a concurrent MAC protocol with master-slave transmission (MSC-MAC). We introduce a concurrent scheduling gap (CSG) before data transmission to schedule the master-slave transmission link by RTS/CTS handshake, and we also set CSG length adjustment strategy and interference tolerance estimation. Simulation shows that our protocol effectively improves the saturation network throughput of UASNs and reduces average energy consumption at the same time.