Handshake triggered chained-concurrent MAC protocol for underwater sensor networks

Abstract

The design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) pose many challenges due to low bandwidth and high propagation delay. In this paper, a new medium access control (MAC) protocol called Handshake Triggered Chained-Concurrent MAC (HTCC) is proposed for large-scale applications in UWSNs. The main idea of HTCC is to establish a chained concurrent transmission accomplishing spatial reuse. The novelties of HTCC lie in: firstly, the protocol allows multi-direction handshake with different nodes simultaneously; secondly, a random access mechanism is integrated with the handshake mechanism for improve channel utilization. Simulation results show that HTCC outperforms extended version of Slotted floor acquisition multiple accesses (Ext-sFAMA) in terms of network throughput, the RTS efficiency, as well as fairness in representative scenarios.