CT-MAC: a MAC protocol for underwater MIMO based network uplink communications

  • Authors:

  • Yu Luo;Lina Pu;Zheng Peng;Zhong Zhou;Jun-Hong Cui

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT;University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT;University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT;University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT;University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Seventh ACM International Conference on Underwater Networks and Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Due to high bandwidth-efficiency, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) has emerged as a promising technique to address the low bandwidth challenges in underwater acoustic networks. Although extensive research has been conducted at the physical layer for underwater MIMO communications, the corresponding medium access control (MAC) is still largely unexplored, which makes it difficult to apply the existing underwater MIMO technologies in real applications. In this paper, we propose a distributed MAC protocol, called Coordinated Transmission MAC (CT-MAC), for underwater MIMO based network uplink communications. In CT-MAC, an efficient coordination scheme among immediate neighbors is designed for channel competition, which can avoid flooding overhead in the network. This scheme could also effectively address the long propagation delay problem and the collisions among long control packets in underwater acoustic communications. Protocol performance in terms of throughput and energy efficiency is evaluated via simulations which show significant improvements over handshaking based and random access based MIMO MAC approaches.