Stentorian MAC: Enhance concurrency in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

The long propagation delay and low data rate of acoustic communication make the exchange of control messages time-consuming. Therefore, traditional handshaking-based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols do not perform well in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASN). In this paper, we propose Stentorian MAC for delay-tolerant UASN with heavy data load. Instead of handshaking, Stentorian MAC uses one-way declaration of transmission plans which can reach all contention peers of the sender. With slotted timing and separation between channel contention and data transmission, it employs a distributed and asynchronous planning strategy, which not only eliminates data collision, but also arranges as many concurrent transmissions as possible, in order to achieve high throughput. We evaluated the concurrency, throughput and packet delay of Stentorian MAC through simulation of random transmission and data aggregation, and confirmed that it has met our design goal.