Backoff-toleration-based opportunistic MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

With the development of underwater internet, Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) have become an important method for collecting marine parameters and data. The Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is the underlying infrastructure of UASNs. It directly affects the utilization of the underwater acoustic channel and the overall performance of the network. The ALOHA protocol is the basis of the random accessing protocols. It freely accesses the channel, so the collision between data packets is very serious. To this end, this paper proposes a Backoff-Toleration-Based Opportunistic (BTBO) protocol. In this protocol, each sensor node opportunistically learns by backoffing tolerantly, and finds the optimal transmission time respectively to transmit the data packet. Simulation results show that the BTBO protocol has better throughput and average end-to-end delay. At the same time, the authors added adaptive design to the dynamic topology networks in the UASNs. The simulation results show that the protocol can effectively alleviate these problems and improve performance.