A distance aware protocol for underwater acoustic communication networks

Energy consumption and channel access time are two of the most crucial design issues in underwater acoustic communication networks since prolonging the network lifetime and improving the network throughput depends on the efficient energy resource management and channel access rules. This paper proposes an improved CSMA protocol for the underwater acoustic communication networks which are characterized by long propagation delays. This protocol shortens the hand-shaking procedure by arranging the sending time in stagger according to the distance between the sender and the receiver. Nodes do not need to be synchronized, are half-duplex, and use the same transmission power. This protocol achieves a throughput much higher than that of the traditional CSMA protocol, while offering similar savings in energy. We have evaluated performance, efficiency and engineering feasibility of this protocol by both software simulations and semi-physical platform tests.