MAC Protocols Based on Busy Duration for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Long propagation delay and low bit rate of underwater acoustic networks (UANs) make these systems fundamentally different from the radio networks. Especially, high propagation delay of acoustic waves makes UANs low efficiency and poor performance. In this paper, we investigate how UANs’ throughput may be enhanced via medium access control (MAC) techniques and propose two new MAC protocols called handshaking with busy duration (HDSK-BD) and Aloha with busy duration (Aloha-BD), which takes advantage of long propagation delay in underwater channel by achieving busy durations of other nodes. Simulation tests on OPNET radio modeler show that two schemes proposed have better performance.