TARS: A Traffic-Adaptive Receiver-Synchronized Medium Access Control Protocol for Underwater Sensor
Efficient medium access control (MAC) is desirable for underwater sensor networks (UWSNs). However, designing an efficient underwater MAC protocol is challenging due to the long propagation delay of the underwater acoustic channel and the spatial-temporal uncertainty.
In this work, we propose a novel Traffic-Adaptive Receiver-Synchronized underwater MAC protocol, TARS, a stochastic light-weight channel access scheme that addresses the spatial-temporal uncertainty for maximizing the network throughput. We adjust the packet transmission time (phase) in a slot, which is dependent on the sender-receiver distance, to align packet receptions for collision reduction. Both the sound propagation speed variation and the node mobility are considered in setting the optimal transmission phase and the slot size. We employ a queue-aware utility-optimization framework to determine the optimal traffic-adaptive transmission strategies dynamically, taking into account both the packet interference and the data queue status. Extensive simulation results show that compared to the existing representative underwater MAC protocols, TARS achieves better performance with higher network throughput and lower packet end-to-end delay.
About the Presenter:
Yu Han received the BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Peking University, China in 2006 and 2009, respectively, and the MS degree in Electrical Engineering from University of California at Santa Cruz in 2011. She is currently working toward her PhD degree under the supervision of Prof. Yunsi Fei in the Northeastern University Energy-Efficient and Secure Systems Lab. Her current research interests include the modeling, optimization and networking protocol design for underwater sensor networks.