Title: Energy-efficient transmissions for bursty traffic in underwater sensor networks

Authors: Chih-Min Chao; Ming-Wei Lu

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan

Abstract: In Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs), sensor nodes have limited energy resource and consume a lot of power during message transmission. Since expensive transmitting power consumption is an inevitable feature of underwater acoustic transmission, to extend network operation time, it is desirable for nodes to avoid energy wastage resulting from transmission collisions. Enabling nodes to use multiple channels in a contention-free way helps reduce transmission collisions. To the best of our knowledge, when nodes have bursty traffic loads, existing UWSN multi-channel solutions do not support contention-free transmission while available UWSN single-channel contention-free protocols generally suffer from low utilisation. In this paper, we propose a contention-free multi-channel MAC protocol for UWSNs that work well even when nodes experience uneven and bursty traffic loads. Simulation results verify that the proposed protocol conserves energy and is extremely suitable for a heavy-loaded environment.

Keywords: UWSNs; underwater sensor networks; multi-channel MAC protocols; contention-free MAC protocols; medium access control; energy efficiency; bursty traffic; power consumption; underwater acoustic transmission; network operation time; transmission collisions; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2013.054018

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2013 Vol.13 No.1, pp.1 - 9

Received: 06 Dec 2011
Accepted: 13 Nov 2012
Published online: 15 May 2013 *

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