FDST-MAC: Exploiting Flipped Diversity and Staggered TDMA MAC Protocol for GUANs

Multi-hop communication is a realistic way to deliver data for long-range underwater monitoring sensor networks. However, this manner poses several challenges to the MAC protocol. 1) larger propagation delays introduce space-time uncertainty in grid underwater acoustic networks. 2) the volatility of underwater acoustic channels increases the difficulty of controlling the packet collision rate, as this kind of volatility is random and difficult to predict. 3) underwater acoustic links have asymmetry characteristic. In this paper, we present the exploiting Flipped Diversity and Staggered TDMA MAC Protocol (FDST-MAC), which introduces super packets, applies Zigzag decoding, and utilizes time reuse to improve network throughput and reduce packet collisions in random grid underwater acoustic networks. Simulation results show that the proposed FDST-MAC can efficiently increase the network throughput.