Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network’s Guard Time Setting with Uncertain Propagation Delay Considerations

Abstract:

Compared with terrestrial radio waves, the underwater acoustic wave propagation is pretty slow and varies more greatly. A lot of current medium access control (MAC) protocol designings for underwater acoustic sensor networks are borrowed from the mature terrestrial networks and have not deeply considered the underwater acoustic propagation characteristics. Such characteristics and proposes a collision model of two consecutive packets in continuous time allocation case in time division multiple access (TDMA) protocols were considered. Then the relationship of the guard time and the distance between the cluster head node and the sensor nodes was analyzed. And finally a guard time settings policy was suggested based on this relationship. Theoretical analysis and simulations show that this approach can improve the conservative traditional guard time settings and can effectively improve the performance and efficiency of underwater acoustic sensor networks.