GSR-TDMA: A Geometric Spatial Reuse-Time Division Multiple Access MAC Protocol for Multihop Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

The nonnegligible propagation delay of acoustic signals causes spatiotemporal uncertainty that occasionally enables simultaneous, collision-free packet transmission among underwater nodes (UNs). These transmissions can be handled by efficiently managing the channel access of the UNs in the data-link layer. To this end, Geometric Spatial Reuse-TDMA (GSR-TDMA), a new TDMA-based MAC protocol, is designed for use in centralized, multihop underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), and in this case all UNs are periodically scheduled after determining a geometric map according to the information on their location. The scheduling strategy increases the number of UNs that send packets coincidentally via two subscheduling configurations (i.e., interhop and intrahop scheduling). Extensive simulations are used to investigate the reception success rate (RSR) and the multihop delay (MHD) of GSR-TDMA, and the results are compared to those of previous approaches, including C-MAC and HSR-TDMA. GSR-TDMA outperforms C-MAC; the RSR of GSR-TDMA is 15% higher than that of C-MAC, and the MHD of GSR-TDMA is 30% lower than that of C-MAC at the most. In addition, GSR-TDMA provides even better performance improvements over HSR-TDMA; the RSR of GSR-TDMA is 50% higher than that of HSR-TDMA, and the MHD of GSR-TDMA is an order of 102 lower than that of HSR-TDMA at the most