Robust Spatial Reuse Scheduling in Underwater Acoustic Communication Networks

Resource assignment in underwater acoustic communication (UWAC) networks has recently drawn much attention in the research community. Although in most applications the number of nodes in the UWAC network is relatively small, the long propagation delay of acoustic signals underwater motivates the application of spatial reuse in channel access protocols for throughput enhancement. In this paper, we address the problem of spatial-reuse scheduling in UWAC networks that support frequent transmission of broadcast packets and require robustness to inaccurate topology information. Taking the possibility of outdated network topology information into account is of great importance for UWAC applications due to time-varying topologies in the underwater environment. Our main contribution is the derivation of a broadcast scheduling algorithm that combines topology-transparent and topology-dependent spatial-reuse scheduling methodologies to achieve high throughput in static and dynamic topology scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate that our protocol provides a favorable tradeoff between network throughput and robustness to outdated topology information due to topology changes, and that it also achieves fairness in terms of per-node throughput.