Exploring Random Access and Handshaking Techniques in Large-Scale Underwater Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks

In this paper, we study the medium access control (MAC) problem in large-scale underwater wireless acoustic sensor networks. We specially explore the random access and handshaking (i.e., RTS/CTS) techniques. We first formally model the two approaches, and then conduct extensive numerical experiments to study their performance in various network conditions. Based on our results, we observe that the performance of random access and RTS/CTS are affected by many factors such as data rate, transmission range, network topology, packet size, and traffic pattern. And our results show that RTS/CTS is more suitable for dense networks with high date rate, low/medium transmission range and bursty traffic, whereas random access is preferred in sparse networks with low data rate and non-bursty traffic. We believe this work will supply useful guidelines for energy-efficient adaptive MAC design in large-scale underwater wireless acoustic sensor networks