An Efficient Geo-Routing Aware MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks - (Invited Paper)

In this paper, we propose an efficient geo-routing aware MAC protocol (GOAL) for underwater acoustic networks. It smoothly integrates self-adaptation based RTS/CTS, geographic cyber carrier sense and implicit ACK to do combined channel reservation and next hop selection. As a result, it possesses the advantages of both geo-routing protocol and reservation based MAC protocol. Specifically, its self-adaptation based RTS/CTS, node can dynamically find out the best nexthop with low route discovery cost. In addition, through geographic cyber carrier sense, node can map its neighbors’ time slots for sending/receiving DATA packets to its own time line, and thus the collision among data packets can be greatly reduced. With these features, GOAL outperforms geo-routing protocols. Plentiful simulation results show that GOAL provides much higher end-to-end reliability with lower energy consumptions than existing VBF routing with broadcast MAC protocol.