A Collaborative Self-adaption Multichannel MAC Protocol For Underwater Sensor Networks

With the development of wireless sensor networks(WSNs)and hydroacoustic communication technologies,underwater sensor acoustic networks(UWSNs)is widely used in various fields of marine surveying,military and environmental matters.As an important part of UWSNs,medium access control(MAC)protocol has been paid more and more attention by researchers.With the development of underwater acoustic technology,UWSNs has realized multi-channel communication,which leads to higher throughput,lower channel access delay and higher energy utilization.However,underwater communication in UWSNs has the characteristics of prolonged time and low bandwidth utilization,which makes the MAC protocol design of high efficiency and reliability face more problems.In addition,the multichannel transceivers are expensive and the triple-hidden terminal problem poses many challenges for single-transceiver-based UWSNs multichannel MAC protocol design.In this paper,we propose a collaborative self-adaptive multi-channel MAC protocol for underwater sensor networks.This protocol is based on a single transceiver,which reduces hardware costs compared to multi-transceiver based MAC protocols.This protocol utilizes the cooperative information between neighbor nodes to perform collision detection,which solves the problem of triple hidden terminals in underwater multi-channel environment and reduces the collision rate;considering the impact of packet length on the retransmission delay,the impact of network load on collision rate,through the adaptive dynamic channel negotiation strategy,the appropriate channel negotiation strategy is dynamically selected according to different packet length and network load,reduce end-to-end delay,increase bandwidth utilization and throughput.This paper simulates the proposed CSA-MAC protocol by NS-3 simulation tool and compares it with the existing underwater multi-channel MAC protocol,quantified CSA-MAC can reduce the end-to-end delay and improve the throughput while guaranteeing lower energy consumption and make the network more reliable and adaptable.