Impact of MAC on Localization in Large-Scale Seabed Sensor Networks

There are many technical challenges to realize the myriad of applications envisaged for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), in particular, determining the location of each node or localization. While various schemes have been proposed recently, the impact of MAC protocols for localization has not been studied. A MAC protocol that can enable many sensor nodes in large-scale networks to share the limited channel resource is an indispensable component to maximize localization coverage and speed, while minimizing communication costs. This can be achieved with MAC schemes that require little or no node coordination. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a multi-stage localization scheme for a large-scale two-dimensional UASN under CSMA (requiring no node coordination) and T-Lohi (requiring light coordination). Our simulation results show that CSMA achieves better localization performance than T-Lohi at the expense of higher communication costs.