Spatial Reuse Time-Division Multiple Access for Broadcast Ad Hoc Underwater Acoustic Communication Networks

Underwater acoustic communication (UWAC) is often the only viable solution to establish an ad hoc underwater communication network. The specific features of UWAC, arising from the physics of underwater acoustics, make the design of resource-efficient media access control (MAC) protocols important as well as challenging. In this paper, we tackle this task considering ad hoc UWAC networks that support high-traffic broadcast communication. To this end, we propose the application of the spatial reuse concept and the exploitation of direct sequence spread spectrum used at the UWAC physical layer to obtain a new hybrid spatial reuse time-division multiple-access (HSR-TDMA) protocol. By tracking the time-varying network topology, our protocol adaptively optimizes the set of active communication nodes and overcomes problems of UWAC networks such as the near-far problem, flickering, and formation of islands. Pertinent performance parameters, namely network availability, message reliability, and transmission rate, are analyzed for the proposed protocol. Evaluation of these analytical performance expressions demonstrates the significant advantages of HSR-TDMA over commonly used conventional TDMA for broadcast UWAC networks. We also report performance results for both the HSR-TDMA and the conventional TDMA protocol from a sea trial at the Haifa harbor, which corroborate the results obtained from the analysis.