A MAC Protocol of Concurrent Scheduling based on Spatial Temporal Uncertainty for Underwater Sensor Network Using ACP CA

Abstract

The Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocol is the most important part of any network and is regarded as a fundamental protocol that aids in improving network and communication performance. However, the design of the MAC protocol for underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) has introduced a number of challenges. Underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) have a high energy consumption, a limited power supply, a low bit rate, a long propagation delay, and spatial-temporal uncertainty, all of which present challenges and opportunities for media access control (MAC) protocol design. Because different nodes transmit packets at different times, time-division transmissions effectively avoid collisions. Nonetheless, in UWSNs with long propagation delays, the period of time must be long enough to avoid collisions, resulting in poor channel capacity and low throughput. Given the long and varying propagation delays between a receiving node and multiple sending nodes in UWSNs, multiple sending nodes can transmit packets simultaneously as long as there is no collision at the receiving node. As a result, in this paper, we propose ACP-CA-CSSTU-MAC (concurrent scheduling based on spatial-temporal uncertainty MAC) for UWSNs as a MAC protocol for concurrent scheduling based on spatial-temporal uncertainty. In UWSNs, the combination of ACP-CA and CSSTU-MAC protocol takes advantage of temporal-spatial uncertainty as well as long propagation delay to achieve concurrent transmission and collision avoidance. In terms of average energy consumption and network throughput, simulation results show that the ACP-CA-CSSTU-MAC protocol outperforms the existing MAC protocol with time-division transmissions.