Adaptive Varying Contention Window MAC Protocol Based on Underwater Acoustic Propagation Delay

Underwater acoustic wave propagation time delay and fluctuations are much greater than radio waves. However, many of the protocols used for underwater acoustic networking and communication are designed according to the principles of terrestrial wireless communication networks, failing to give full consideration to utilizing the underwater acoustic propagation and its time delay variation. For this reason, this article proposes an adaptive varying contention window media access control (AVCW-MAC) protocol based on propagation delay. The protocol uses AVCW random backoff mechanism to differently set up the CW of each node based on the different propagation delays from each underwater sensor node to the cluster head node to improve the channel utilization. In addition, to avoid excessive difference in the CW of each node, the backoff factors
$\mathbf {K}_{\mathbf {{1}}}$
and
$\mathbf {K}_{\mathbf {{2}}}$
are introduced in the AVCW random backoff mechanism to improve the fairness of nodes’ accessing the channel. Simulation results show that for the same amount of sensor nodes, the AVCW-MAC protocol has significantly improved network throughput and decreased average end-to-end latency when compared to legacy CW-MAC protocols.