STUMP: Exploiting Position Diversity in the Staggered TDMA Underwater MAC Protocol

In this paper, we propose the Staggered TDMA Underwater MAC Protocol (STUMP), a scheduled, collision free TDMA-based MAC protocol that leverages node position diversity and the low propagation speed of the underwater channel. STUMP uses propagation delay information to overlap node communication and increase channel utilization. Our work yields several important conclusions. First, leveraging node position diversity through scheduling yields large improvements in channel utilization. Second, STUMP does not require tight node synchronization to achieve high channel utilization, allowing nodes to use simple or more energy efficient synchronization protocols. Finally, we briefly present and evaluate algorithms that derive STUMP schedules.