Media Access Control Protocol based on Dynamic Time Slot Assignment in Underwater Mobile Ad-hoc Network

Abstract

Underwater wireless network can be useful in various fields such as underwater environment observation, catastrophe prevention, ocean resources exploration, ocean organism research, and vessel sinking exploration. We need to develop an efficient design for Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to improve multiple data communication in underwater environment. Aloha protocol is one of the basic and simple protocols, but it has disadvantage such as collision occurs oftenly in communication. If there is collision occured in RF communication, problem can be solved by re-sending the data, but using low frequency in underwater, the re-transmission has difficulties due to slow bit-rate. So, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based MAC protocol is going to be used to avoid collisions, but if there is no data to send in existing TDMA, time slot should not be used. Therefore, this paper proposes dynamic TDMA protocol mechanism with reducing the time slots by sending short "I Have No Data" (IHND) message, if there is no data to transmit. Also, this paper presents mathematic analysis model in relation to data throughput, channel efficiency and verifies performance superiority by comparing the existing TDMA protocols.