Predictive Wake-Up Based Optimized MAC Protocol Design for Underwater Sensor Networks

The Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) provides an effective way of communicating in aquatic environments to overcome the constraints of applying terrestrial MAC protocols. Due to unique challenges and requirements of underwater communication, designing specialized MAC protocols for UWSNs is crucial to conserve energy. Currently, research has focused on duty-cycled receiver-initiated asynchronous MAC protocols due to their superior performance over sender-initiated protocols and their ability to overcome the challenges of synchronous MAC protocols. However, existing UWSN MAC protocols suffer from re-transmissions, energy loss, protocol overheads, and longer duty-cycle periods. This paper proposes a MAC protocol for UWSNs, termed Predictive Wake-Up Based Optimized MAC (PWO-MAC) protocol, which incorporates an additive increase and multiplicative decrease (AIMD) technique along with a predictive wake-up scheduling approach. The proposed PWO-MAC protocol dynamically adjusts transmission rates, enabling re-transmissions only upon failure and reducing multiple transmission. The protocol optimizes protocol overhead, reduces energy consumption, ensures minimum delay and enhances network throughput.