Exploring random access and handshaking techniques in underwater wireless acoustic networks
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Exploring random access and handshaking techniques in underwater wireless acoustic networks Zhong Zhou1* , Zheng Peng1 , Peng Xie1 , Jun-Hong Cui1 and Zaihan Jiang2
Abstract In this article, we study the medium access control (MAC) problem in underwater wireless acoustic networks. We explore the random access and handshaking (i.e., RTS/CTS) techniques in both single-channel and multi-channel network scenarios. We model and analyze these two approaches, and conduct extensive simulations to study their performance in various network conditions. Based on our results, we observe that the performance of both approaches are affected by many factors such as data rate, propagation delay and packet size. Our results show that the RTS/CTS approach is more suitable for dense networks with high date rate, whereas the random access approach is preferred in sparse networks with low data rate. Our results also demonstrate that multi-channel techniques can potentially help us combat the long delay feature of underwater acoustic channels. However, uncoordinated random channel access cannot fully exploit the advantages of the multi-channel network settings and it performs even worse than the single-channel random access protocol. Only with careful design and coordination such as multi-channel access with RTS/CTS handshaking process, can multi-channel MAC protocols greatly improve the system performance. We believe that this study will provide useful guidelines for efficient MAC design in underwater wireless acoustic networks. 1 Introduction Recently, there has been a rapidly growing interest in monitoring underwater environments for scientific exploration, commercial exploitation, and coastline protection. The ideal vehicle for this type of extensive applications is a distributed underwater system with networked wireless nodes, referred to as underwater wireless networks [1,2]. However, due to the unique characteristics of underwater acoustic channels (such as limited available bandwidth, long propagation delay and extensive time-varying multi-path effects) and the harsh underwater environment, building autonomous underwater acoustic networks encounters grand challenges at almost every level of the protocol stack. Since the inception of the concept of underwater networks, a large amount of research study has been conducted in this interesting research area. Readers can refer [1-5] for challenges and states-of-art for the research in *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Computer Science & Engineering Department, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
underwater networks. New routing and medium access control (MAC) protocols were proposed in [6-11] to accommodate the unique characteristics of underwater acoustic networks. The authors of [12] investigated the synchronization problem for long delay acoustic channels of UWSN. In [13], the authors addressed the energy issues in UWSN and proposed methods to estimate the battery life
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