On the Throughput of Linear Unicast Underwater Networks

The large propagation delay of underwater acoustic signals significantly affects the throughput performance of underwater communication networks. While past research focused on mitigating the impact of large propagation delays, recent work has suggested exploiting large delays. In this paper, we consider an underwater linear unicast network which employs a time- division based scheduling strategy to exploit large propagation delays to improve network throughput. We assume the protocol model in a network with partially overlapping collision domains, where the transmission range is normalized as 1 and the interference range is an integer k. We systematically discuss the throughput of the linear networks with single traffic flow, showing that the average throughput of an N-node linear network with single traffic flow cannot exceed (N-1)/k. We then propose a general transmission scheduling strategy that can achieve the throughput upper bound and also give some examples of the optimal schedules.