An efficient mac protocol for data collection in underwater wireless sensor networks

One of the fundamental differences between the terrestrial radio frequency (RF) signal and underwater acoustic signal is long propagation delay. This paper is focused on a scheduling scheme for regional data collection in underwater acoustic sensor networks. Long propagation delay of the acoustic signal causes a serious problem for transmission scheduling. In this paper, we propose an efficient transmission scheduling algorithm using the property of long propagation delay for real-time data collection which is critical to tactical surveillance applications. We show through the simulation that the proposed scheme reduces total transmission time and increases the network efficiency significantly.