Logical Link Control and Channel Scheduling for Multichannel Underwater Sensor Networks

With recent developments in terrestrial wireless networks and advances in acoustic communications, multichannel technologies have been proposed to be used in underwater networks to increase data transmission rate over bandwidth-limited underwater channels. Due to high bit error rates in underwater networks, an efficient error control technique is critical in the logical link control (LLC) sublayer to establish reliable data communications over intrinsically unreliable underwater channels. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol stack architecture featuring cross-layer design of LLC sublayer and more efficient packetto-channel scheduling for multichannel underwater sensor networks. In the proposed stack architecture, a selective-repeat automatic repeat request (SR-ARQ) based error control protocol is combined with a dynamic channel scheduling policy at the LLC sublayer. The dynamic channel scheduling policy uses the channel state information provided via cross-layer design. It is demonstrated that the proposed protocol stack architecture leads to more efficient transmission of multiple packets over parallel channels. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the packet delay performance of the proposed cross-layer protocol stack architecture with two different scheduling policies: the proposed dynamic channel scheduling and a static channel scheduling. Simulation results show that the dynamic channel scheduling used in the cross-layer protocol stack outperforms the static channel scheduling. It is observed that, when the dynamic channel scheduling is used, the number of parallel channels has only an insignificant impact on the average packet delay. This confirms that underwater sensor networks will benefit from the use of multichannel communications.