An Efficient Medium Access Control Protocol for under Water Acoustic Sensor Network

Unlike a terrestrial wireless communication which uses radio waves, underwater communication relies on acoustic waves. The long latency and limited bandwidth pose great challenges in Underwater Media Access Control (MAC) design. So this paper proposes a new MAC protocol for wireless sensor acoustic network which are adaptable to underwater environment. This new protocol is based on the classic MACA to avoid hidden and exposed node problem. It also address the fragmentation issue, instead of sending a large packet it proposes to send fragmented packets to improve the throughput of the network. It introduces a new binary exponential back-off mechanism to reduce the possibilities of collision and hence to improve the throughput. The simulation result of the proposed protocol shows that its performance is better than the other MAC protocol. The simplicity and throughput stability of proposed MAC make it an appropriate reference MAC protocol.