DAMAC: A Delay-Aware MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Ahmed Al Guqhaiman; Oluwatobi Akanbi; Amer Aljaedi; Adel R Alharbi; C Edward Chow

doi:10.3390/s21155229

DAMAC: A Delay-Aware MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Sensors (Basel). 2021 Aug 2;21(15):5229. doi: 10.3390/s21155229.

Authors

Ahmed Al Guqhaiman^{1

2}, Oluwatobi Akanbi¹, Amer Aljaedi³, Adel R Alharbi³, C Edward Chow¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs, CO 80918, USA.
² Department of Computer Networks and Communications, College of Computer Sciences and Information Technology, King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia.
³ College of Computing and Information Technology, University of Tabuk, Tabuk 71491, Saudi Arabia.

Abstract

In a channel shared by several nodes, the scheduling algorithm is a key factor to avoiding collisions in the random access-based approach. Commonly, scheduling algorithms can be used to enhance network performance to meet certain requirements. Therefore, in this paper we propose a Delay-Aware Media Access Control (DAMAC) protocol for monitoring time-sensitive applications over multi-hop in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs), which relies on the random access-based approach where each node uses Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) to determine channel status, switches nodes on and off to conserve energy, and allows concurrent transmissions to improve the underwater communication in the UASNs. In addition, DAMAC does not require any handshaking packets prior to data transmission, which helps to improve network performance in several metrics. The proposed protocol considers the long propagation delay to allow concurrent transmissions, meaning nodes are scheduled to transmit their data packets concurrently to exploit the long propagation delay between underwater nodes. The simulation results show that DAMAC protocol outperforms Aloha, BroadcastMAC, RMAC, Tu-MAC, and OPMAC protocols under varying network loads in terms of energy efficiency, communication overhead, and fairness of the network by up to 65%, 45%, and 726%, respectively.

Keywords: concurrent transmissions; media access control protocols; propagation delay; quality of service; underwater acoustic sensor networks; underwater nodes.