Collision Avoidance Energy Efficient Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for UnderWater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

Collisions in underwater acoustic networks can not be tolerated due to the fundamental differences between underwater acoustic propagation and terrestrial radio propagation. Thus conceiving medium access protocols that avoid collision to the most possible extent is of paramount importance. In this paper, a multi-channel MAC protocol, MC-UWMAC, especially designed for underwater acoustic sensor networks, is proposed and evaluated. MC-UWMAC is an energy efficient MAC protocol that aims at achieving a collision free communication. MC-UWMAC operates on a single slotted control channel to avoid the missing receiver problem and multiple data channels to improve the network throughput. To guarantee to the most possible extent a collision free communication, MC-UWMAC uses two key newly designed procedures: i) a grid based slot assignment procedure on the common slotted control channel that approaches the 2-hop conflict free slot assignment and ii) a quorum based data channel allocation procedure. More precisely, according to MC-UWMAC, a sender uses its own dedicated slot on the common control channel for handshaking with an intended neighbor receiver. However, data transmission takes place in a unique data channel especially reserved for this pair of neighbor nodes. In fact, MC-UWMAC reserves for each pair of neighbor nodes a unique data channel that aims at being 2-hop conflict free. As such, the probability of collision is highly reduced and even completely mitigated in some scenarios. In addition, by using multiple channels, MC-UWMAC allows multiple data communications along with handshaking on the common control channel to take place at the same time and hence the network throughput as well as energy efficiency are improved. Simulation results show that MC-UWMAC can greatly improve the network performance especially in terms of energy consumption, throughput and end-to-end delay.

A Collision-Free Hybrid MAC Protocol Based on Pipeline Parallel Transmission for Distributed Multi-Channel Underwater Acoustic Networks

“…Recent studies showed that such a parallelism can improve the performance of underwater acoustic networks effectively [22]. Multi-channel MAC protocols can be classified into two categories: single rendezvous] and multiple rendezvous [23]. In single rendezvous protocols [23][24][25][26], all control packets are exchange over one common control channel.…”

“…Multi-channel MAC protocols can be classified into two categories: single rendezvous] and multiple rendezvous [23]. In single rendezvous protocols [23][24][25][26], all control packets are exchange over one common control channel. This method can solve the problem that the source may fail to shake hand with the destination since they reside on different channels.…”

“…In the single channel contention-based MAC protocol [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21], parallel transmission was mainly implemented in time and space domain since there was only one channel. In the multi-channel contention-based MAC protocol [22][23][24][25][26][27], parallel transmission can be implemented through multiple channels and most of the attentions were attracted to the channel negotiation mechanism, while time and space domain parallelism were seldom considered.…”

Enhancing the spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of underwater channel communication by optimal cooperative spectrum sensing using hybrid optimization

“…In particular, the major issue present in UW‐ASNs is THT issue. It happens because of the occurrence of collision that evokes from multichannel and multihop communication occurred with extensive broadcast delay 9 …”

Time Evolution of Underwater Sensor Networks Coverage and Connectivity Using Physically Based Mobility Model

“…Earlier works on UW-ASNs tried to model and address the harsh challenges imposed by the underwater channel [2][3][4][5][6][7] such as high attenuation, limited bandwidth, and high and variable propagation time. Then, researches have started work on networking solutions such as synchronization [8], localization [9,10], routing protocols [4,11,12], energy efficiency, and MAC issues [13][14][15][16], but mainly under limited mobility constraint.…”