Abstract
Underwater Media Access Control (MAC) protocol design faces more challenges due to the unique characteristics of acoustic communication such as the long propagation delay and limited bandwidth. The long propagation delay in underwater causes the hidden terminal and spatially unfair problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient MAC protocol for multi-hop underwater acoustic sensor networks, which we shall call the EHM—Efficient Handshaking Mechanism. It is a handshaking-based protocol that addresses the hidden terminal and spatially unfair problem, and the EHM protocol can improve the channel utilization by allowing a node to receive data packets from multiple potential senders simultaneously. This method can reduce the relative proportion of time spent on control packets. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated via simulations. Experiment results show that the EHM protocol outperforms in channel utilization, fairness of transmission and end-to-end packets delay.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (Grant No 2011121050), the Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.61001142), and the Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.61071150).
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Lin, W., Cheng, E. & Yuan, F. EHM: a novel efficient protocol based handshaking mechanism for underwater acoustic sensor networks. Wireless Netw 19, 1051–1061 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-012-0517-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-012-0517-1