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T-Lohi: A New Class of MAC Protocols for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Affan A. Syed, Wei Ye, and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

 This paper introduces T-Lohi, a new class of distributed and energy-efficient media-access protocols (MAC) for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWSN). MAC design for UWSN faces significant challenges. For example, acoustic communication suffers from latencies five orders-of-magnitude larger than radio communication, so a naive CSMA MAC would require very long listen time resulting in low throughput and poor energy efficiency. In this paper, we first identify unique characteristics in underwater networking that may affect all MACs, such as space-time uncertainty and deafness conditions. We then develop T-Lohi employing a novel tone-based reservation mechanism that exploits space-time uncertainty and high latency to detect collisions and count contenders, achieving good throughput across all offered loads. It employs our low-power wake-up receiver to significantly reduce energy consumption. Finally, we evaluate design choices and protocol performance through extensive simulation. The results show that the energy cost of packet transmission is within 3-9% of optimal, that our protocols achieve good channel utilization, within 30% of the theoretical maximum. We also show that our protocols are stable and fair under both low and very high offered loads.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Syed07a
Affan A. Syed, Wei Ye, and John Heidemann. T-Lohi: A New Class of MAC Protocols for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks. Technical Report ISI-TR-638b, USC/Information Sciences Institute, April, 2007. Technical report originally released April 2007, updated July 2007. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Syed07a.html>. 
@techreport{Syed07a,
	author = "Affan A. Syed and Wei Ye and John Heidemann",
	title = "{T-Lohi}: A New Class of {MAC} Protocols for
                         Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks",
	institution = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	year = "2007",
	number = "ISI-TR-638b",
	month = "April",
	note = "Technical report originally released April 2007,
                         updated July 2007",
	keywords = "Lohi, underwater MAC, acoustic networks",
	supporting = "The simulator used in this paper is available at
                         \url{http://www.isi.edu/ilense/software/}.",
	myorganization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	copyrightholder = "authors",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Syed07a.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Syed07a.pdf",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2007 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.


© 2008 $Date$