A hybrid reservation-based MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Due to the characteristics of underwater acoustic channel, such as long propagation delay and low available bandwidth, media access control (MAC) protocol designed for the underwater acoustic sensor network (UWASN) is quite different from that for the terrestrial wireless sensor network. However, for the contention-based MAC protocols, the packet transmission time is long because of the long preamble in real acoustic modems, which increase the packet collisions. And the competition phase lasts for long time when many nodes are competing for the channel to access. For the schedule-based MAC protocols, the delay is too long, especially in a UWASN with low traffic load. In order to resolve these problems, a hybrid reservation-based MAC (HRMAC) protocol is proposed for UWASNs in this paper. In the proposed HRMAC protocol, the nodes reserve the channel by declaring and spectrum spreading technology is used to reduce the collision of the control packets. Many nodes with data packets to be transmitted can reserve the channel simultaneously, and nodes with reserved channel transmit their data in a given order. The performance analysis shows that the proposed HRMAC protocol can improve the channel efficiency greatly. Simulation results also show that the proposed HRMAC protocol achieves better performance, namely higher network throughput, lower packet drop ratio, smaller end-to-end delay, less overhead of control packets and lower energy overhead, compared to existing typical MAC protocols for the UWASNs.