Efficient Data Collection for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The inherent high-latency feature of acoustic transmission within an underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) enables multiple transmitters at varying distances from the receiver to transmit simultaneously. Many existing medium access control (MAC) protocols utilize this high latency feature to reduce data collection time. However, most MAC protocols use contention-based mechanisms and face transmission collisions as the number of nodes increases. In this article, we propose a contention-free pipelined scheduling (CFPS) protocol to reduce data collection time in a single-hop network. The primary concept behind CFPS involves partitioning nodes into subclusters and developing a collision-free transmission scheduling table for different subcluster heads. The CFPS protocol is expected to reduce data collection time and improve network throughput when compared to the three well-designed data collection protocols, namely, a delay-aware probability-based MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks, random handshake MAC protocol based on Nash Equilibrium for UWSNs, and leveraging the near far effect for improved spatial-reuse scheduling in underwater acoustic networks.