A Delay Time Overlapping MAC Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks are widely used in environmental monitoring and a variety of applications. However, underwater wireless sensor networks should be handled carefully because they have inherent disadvantages, such as long propagation delay in the acoustic signal and low-bandwidth. If using existing protocols for a terrestrial wireless network in an underwater network, performance decreases significantly, so there is a need for a new protocol. This study aims to improve performance that is reduced by a long wait time after a request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) transmission in the MAC protocol handshake. By utilizing the wait time after transmitting a packet, sending packets that can be transferred to a neighbor Node Can provide better performance. Experimental results show that end-to-end delay and throughput performance are significantly improved, compared to the existing well-known protocol.