AMS: A New MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks

The propagation delay is one of important characteristics of underwater acoustic networks. The article analyzes two instances offered by applying MACAW protocol and ALOHA protocol to the underwater acoustic network separately, and then tables a proposal to counteract the bad influence of the propagation delay by decreasing the number of non-in-effect packets. Based on the proposal, it puts forward a new MAC protocol which is called AMS (Aloha-Macaw-Synthesis). It is the main idea of AMS that it integrates an in-effect packet and a non-in-effect packet into one packet, which it can reduce the number of non-in-effect packets in the network through. In order to alleviating the collision frequency between packets, AMS also absorbs MILD arithmetic from MACAW protocol. Simulation results show that AMS protocol has greater prospect of applications than ALOHA protocol in underwater acoustic networks.