Performance Analysis of p-Persistent Aloha for Multi-hop Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Media Access Control (MAC) must be carefully considered in multi-hop Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) due to limited bandwidth and large propagation delay. In particular, variable propagation delays in UASNs cause inaccurate time synchronization and therefore make reservation-based protocols less favorable. Large propagation delays limit the performance of carrier sense in predicting the status of the intended recipients, and therefore CSMA protocols show bad performance in UASNs too. Therefore, simple protocols, such as Aloha, show promise for UASNs. In this paper we consider the performance of a multi-hop p-persistent ALOHA protocol.