SRCR: A novel MAC protocol for underwater acoustic networks with concurrent reservation

Due to the high propagation delay and limited bandwidth of underwater acoustic channels, the design of media access control (MAC) protocols for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) faces great challenges and opportunities. In this paper, we propose a novel handshaking-based MAC protocol, called as sender and receiver concurrent reservation (SRCR) protocol, for multi-hop UASNs. The key idea of the proposed protocol is to adopt a concurrent reservation mechanism to allow the sender´s neighbors and the receiver´s neighbors to transmit packets during the communication between the sender and the receiver without collision. Simulation results have confirmed that the proposed protocol can offer good performance of both throughput and delay in multi-hop UASNs with high channel utilization.