Analyzing the Performance of Multi-hop Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Multi-hop underwater acoustic sensor networks constrain the performance of medium access control protocols. The efficiency of the well-known RTS-CTS scheme is degraded due to long propagation delays of such networks. Recently, interest in Aloha variants has surfaced; however, the performance of such protocols within the context of multi-hop networks is not well studied. In this paper, we identify the challenges of modeling contention-based medium access control protocols and present a model for analyzing Aloha variants for a simple string topology as a first step toward analyzing the performance of contention-based proposals in multi-hop underwater acoustic sensor networks. An application of the model suggests that Aloha variants are vary sensitive to traffic loads and network size.