Signal-to-noise and interference ratio analysis for ALOHA underwater acoustic networks

This work investigates the signal-to-noise and interference ratio (SNIR) for underwater acoustic networks (UANs) employing ALOHA as medium access control (MAC) protocol. A uniformly random spatial node distribution model is proposed. The model allows to obtain the SNIR between a pair of nodes as function of network parameters like the radius size, the communication frequency, the total amount of nodes in the network and the transmission power. Numerical and Monte-Carlo simulation results are presented which show that the average SNIR rapidly decay with the increase of network radius size while it peaks for a given frequency. In addition, the SNIR decreases with the augment of the number of nodes in the network. The results also show which term (interference or noise) dominates the SNIR depending on the network parameters, i.e., if interference is higher than noise (and vice versa) which can help the design of underwater wireless networks by appropriately adjusting the parameters.