A bidirectional full duplex medium access control protocol for underwater acoustic networks

In this paper, we propose a bidirectional full duplex MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol for underwater acoustic networks. An underwater sensor node can set a back-off timer according to the priority of transmission. When the back-off timer expires, the underwater sensor node acquires a transmission opportunity. If a source node wants to send data to a destination node, it broadcasts RTS (Request-To-Send) including ID of the destination node to neighbor nodes. The destination node receiving RTS sends CTS (Clear-To-Send) to the source node to inform the bidirectional full duplex communication. After the source node receives CTS, the source node and the destination node can send the data to each other. In the underwater environment, the existing MAC protocol may take a lot of time for successful transmission of data due to long underwater propagation delay. On the other hand, the proposed bidirectional full duplex MAC protocol improves the throughput by shortening the time for successful transmission of data. In this paper, we analyze the throughput of the proposed bidirectional full duplex MAC protocol. In addition, we show that the proposed bidirectional full duplex MAC protocol has better performance in the presence of the long underwater propagation delay compared with existing MAC protocols for underwater environments.