TARS

Abstract

Efficient medium access control (MAC) is desirable for underwater sensor networks (UWSNs). However, designing an efficient underwater MAC protocol is challenging due to the long propagation delay of the underwater acoustic channel and spatial-temporal uncertainty. In this article, we propose a novel Traffic-Adaptive Receiver-Synchronized underwater MAC protocol, TARS, for throughput maximization. We divide time into equal-sized slots, each the size of one packet transmission time plus a guard time to cope with network dynamics. We adjust the packet transmission phase in a slot, determined by the sender-receiver distance, to align packet receptions for collision reduction. Both the sound propagation speed variation and the node mobility are considered in setting the transmission phase and slot size. We employ a queue-aware utility-optimization framework to determine the optimal transmission strategies dynamically, taking into account both the interference and data queue status. Extensive simulation results show that compared to the existing representative protocols, TARS achieves better performance with higher network throughput and lower packet delay (e.g., about 13%−146% higher in throughput and 13%−21% lower in delay than others in a mobile ad hoc network), as well as robustness under network mobility. Thus, TARS is highly suitable for mobile and traffic-varying UWSNs.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Sep 08, 2017
Source ID
10.1145/3105149

Entities

People

  • Han Yu
  • Yunsi Fei

Organizations

  • National Science Foundation
  • Northeastern University
  • Office of Naval Research

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Computer Networking