Performance Analysis of Underwater Acoustic Network Protocols Using Contention Based MAC

Many military underwater scenarios like Intelligence gathering, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR) requires flexible underwater acoustic networking. The acoustic channel is challenging and the network protocols need to take that into account. Often some type of reduced flooding together with contention based Medium Access Control (MAC) like ALOHA, are used. Such a protocol solution has its pros and cons. This paper investigates one such protocol solution called Dflood. The performance of Dflood is evaluated in different network topologies and for different network sizes. Although Dflood is flexible, the results show that it is difficult to combine a satisfactory Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) with a high channel utilization.