A MAC protocol design for underwater acoustic wifi network

Abstract

Underwater acoustic WiFi (UWA-WiFi) network is similar to the traditional terrestrial WiFi network, which provides wireless access services for underwater nodes (e.g., marine engineering equipment, underwater vehicles, divers, sensors, and so on). MAC protocol design is an essential issue for UWA-WiFi network. Due to the natures of low available bandwidth, long and variable propagation delay, and time varying on acoustic channel, the existing MAC protocols for terrestrial WiFi network can't be directly applied to UWA-WiFi network. In this paper, we introduced customized Slotted-FAMA protocol for UWA-WiFi network. Furthermore, we did a pool experiment to testify the practicability of customized Slotted-FAMA protocol. The results of the experiment show that customized Slotted-FAMA can significantly reduce the probability of collisions and enhance the performance.