An Adaptive MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks with Dynamic Traffic

Underwater acoustic sensor network has attracted strong attention from both researchers and industry. While it is applied in underwater environment monitoring, the network traffic load always changes with the underwater environment. This brings new challengs to underwater acoustic sensor network protocols. Many existing works on TDMA-based MAC protocol focus on the traffic load fixed scenario and the slot assignment is based on the maximum traffic. It leads to inefficient use of channel resources. In this paper, we propose an adaptive MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks with dynamic traffic (AMPDT) to handle the dynamic traffic load issues. The slot assignment on sink node is based on the traffic estimation report from the sensor nodes. Simulation results show that our proposal can effectively improve the network throughput and reduce the end to end delay.