Propagation Delay Utilization And Data Concurrent Transmission MAC Protocol For Underwater Acoustic Communication Networks

With the increasing demand for marine exploration,the communication quality of un-derwater acoustic communication networks(UWANs)plays a prominent role.The UWAN-s can be widely applied in marine environmental monitoring,disaster warning,submarine resource exploration,real-time control of underwater nodes,and military operational com-mand,etc.The characteristics of UWANs,such as long propagation delay,limited energy,and narrow frequency band,make the media access control(MAC)protocol one of the crit-ical factors affecting the performance of the UWANs,and also bring great difficulties and challenges to protocol design.The MAC protocols are used to solve the problem of channel resource allocation when multiple nodes share one link,also to overcome those difficulties of UWANs to improve system throughput,reduce energy consumption and shorten end-to-end delay.Hence,it is especially important to design an appropriate MAC protocol to support UWANs.The main work of this paper aims to design a concurrent transmission MAC protocol(PD-DCT protocol)for UWANs to overcome the problem brought by the long propaga-tion delay,low node energy and packet collisions.The basic idea of the protocol is that,by proposing a concurrent transmission condition,the sink node establishes a concurrent transmission table for each node in the networks.And then,the sending nodes can chose a concurrent transmission node from the table to fully utilize the propagation delay,and realize the concurrent transmission of data packets in the same time slot without collision-s.This MAC protocol reduces the times of handshakes as well as the average end-to-end delay and energy consumption of data transmission,and improves the throughput of the entire network as well as the channel utilization.The simulation of PD-DCT MAC protocol is implemented on the Aqua-sim simula-tor,and the performances of PD-DCT protocol are compared with several existing MAC protocols of UWANs.The network simulation includes the implementation of underwa-ter acoustic communication model,PD-DCT protocol model,table construction algorithm and concurrent transmission algorithm.The communication model and algorithm are im-plemented by C++,and the network topology and traffic agent are implemented by OTCL.The simulation results verify that the PD-DCT protocol outperforms the existing protocols and provides better performances in terms of throughput,energy consumption,and average end-to-end delay.