Adaptive Energy Reservation MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

Distinguishing with the radio frequency (RF) communication for the terrestrial wireless sensor net-works, the peculiarity of acoustic communication in underwater environment causes many issues of energy consumption, propagation delay, time synchronization and other factors when designing the sensor network. The MAC protocol, which plays an important role of managing and controlling the channels, should overcome these requirements in the underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs). In this paper, we proposed a new MAC protocol called adaptive energy reservation MAC (AER-MAC) protocol which exploits the transmission signal strength related to a distance concept in order to make the network transmission schedule. Since, the underwater acoustic communication channels are characterized by a path loss and absorption loss that depend on the distance between the transmitter and receiver. Therefore, a sensor node can send a reservation packet with a power value in which other nodes in the calculation range can receipt this packet.