An heuristic link scheduling model for underwater acoustic sensor networks

The significantly slower propagation speed of acoustic signals, in contrast to RF signals, make the protocol design differ from RF wireless networks. This paper presents an efficient link scheduling method applied to underwater acoustic networks based on TDMA by analyzing the four conflict model in wireless network, and puts forward a conflict description method based on correlation matrix. The proposed conflict matrix can describe the conflict relationships among links completely. It can simplify the designing of channel access controlling. The solution dealing with the conflict matrix proposed in the paper which is not only taking spatial reuse in consider, but also has a low complexity. It can find a conflict-free scheduling and the approximate minimum frame under the conflict-free scheduling in finite iteration. Simulation results show that the proposed method can get a approximate minimum frame length under different slot length. It also improves network throughput and reduces the average end to end delay performances of the networks.