Distance awareness scheduling for single-hop underwater ad-hoc network

Underwater acoustic networks (UAN) are becoming an integral part of a wide range of applications, such as those used for exploration and maintenance in the offshore oil and gas industry, surveillance for homeland security, subsea mine counter measures, marine environmental assessment and diving activities. For UAN, efficient and effective media access control (MAC) is a very important requirement to address the challenges of dense network deployment and shared communication media. Several types of MAC protocols have been developed for radio networks; however, they are not directly adaptable to UAN due to the significant differences between terrestrial radio and underwater acoustic channels. In this paper, we propose a scheduling protocol according to distance awareness to combat propagation delays for ad hoc UAN. The network module and related assumptions are outlined, and a performance analysis, looking at packet transmission probability, maximum saturation throughput and average end to end delay, is also presented. Analytical and practical scenarios and simulations, including network topology, parameters and results, have been discussed.