Stochastic medium access control for underwater acoustic sensor networks

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20213754

Underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), the enabling technology for a broad range of aquatic applications, rely on acoustic communication for long-range transmissions. However, underwater acoustic communication suffers from several adverse features, such as long propagation delay and low bandwidth, making the networking design for UWSNs much more challenging than their terrestrial counterparts. Medium access control (MAC), a crucial component in networking design, coordinates among multiple agents that share the same channel resource and is responsible to schedule packet transmissions efficiently and fairly. However, due to the long propagation delay, the traditional handshaking-based random-access MAC protocols are not channel efficient for UWSNs.