A Traffic-Aware Fair MAC Protocol for Layered Data Collection Oriented Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Underwater acoustic channels are characterized by long propagation delay, limited available bandwidth and high energy costs. These unique characteristics bring challenges to design media access control (MAC) protocol for underwater sensor networks (UASNs). Especially in data-collection-oriented UASNs, data generated at nodes transmitted hop-by-hop the sink node. The traffic loads undertaken of different depths different. However, most existing MAC protocols do not consider load imbalance resulting unfairness how transmit their own data. In this paper, we propose a novel traffic-aware fair layered called TF-MAC. TF-MAC accesses medium assigning time slots lengths each layer via achieve fairness nodes. To improve throughput avoid collision network, an overlapping slot division mechanism layers multi-channel allocation scheme within single is employed. Considering time-varying nodes, adaptive packet length algorithm proposed taking advantage spatial-temporal uncertainty channels. A sea experiment was conducted prove which provides feasibility basis algorithm. Simulation results show that can greatly network performance terms throughput, consumption, UASNs.