A Distributed OFDMA Medium Access Control for Underwater Acoustic Sensors Networks

In this paper, we propose UW-OFDMAC, a distributed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol tuned for Under-Water Acoustic Sensor Networks (UW-ASNs). It is a transmitter based Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA)scheme that integrates an original power and OFDMA parameters self-assignment algorithm to set the optimal transmit power, subcarrier spacing and guard interval duration. UW-OFDMAC aims at achieving two objectives, namely, guarantee high bandwidth efficiency and low energy consumption. Simulation results show that UW-OFDMAC outperforms the basic OFDMA protocol tuned for the underwater environment.