Efficiency Reservation MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

The MAC protocol is one of the most concerned issued for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UWASNs). Distinguishing with the radio frequency (RF) communication for the terrestrial wireless sensor networks, the peculiarity of acoustic communication in underwater environment causes many issues of energy consumption, propagation delay, time synchronization and other factors when designing the sensor network. Moreover, the high propagation delay (about 1 second over 1.5 km) causes a serious problem for the MAC protocol. In this paper, we proposed a new MAC protocol called Efficiency Reservation MAC (ERMAC) protocol which is suitable for the peculiarity of acoustic communication in underwater environment. In this proposed protocol we used the sink node and cluster nodes centralized topology. Since the sink node uses the transmission time delay as a measure to exploit the relative location of sensor nodes, the protocol can efficiently schedule and manage the reliable acoustic communication in its cluster.