Underwater Experiment on CSMA/CA Protocol Using Commercial Modems

Key Words: underwater communication, underwater sensor network, MAC protocol This paper introduces a test bed for communication protocol schemes of underwater acoustic sensor network, and also shows experimental results obtained from the test bed. As a testing protocol, carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) is evaluated on underwater acoustic channel. A sensor node is equipped with a DSP control board of ATmega2560 and a commercial underwater modem produced by Benthos. The control board not only manipulates a GPS signal to acquire the information of location and time, but also controls the underwater modem to operate according to the procedure designed for a given testing protocol. Whenever any event takes place such as exchanging control/data packets between underwater modems an