Multihop underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) suffer from low throughput caused by low channel utilization and unreasonable bandwidth allocation. The existing media access control (MAC) protocols for UASNs mainly aim to improve channel utilization but neglect to optimize bandwidth, so that they cannot achieve high throughput in miltihop networks. We propose the idea of joint bandwidth optimization and MAC in this paper. We first present a system model to optimize bandwidth for miltihop UASNs. Both the complicated interference relations between links and the different transmission demands of nodes are modeled. Thus, it can accurately reflect the characteristics of miltihop UASNs. By analyzing a 1-D linear miltihop network, we find and formulate a maximum hop number which is determined by nodes' traffic load and channel capacity. The other finding is that an optimal scheduling needs to allocate the bandwidth based on traffic load, and the nodes with more traffic load should be allocated more bandwidth. This finding inspire us to develop a distributed traffic-based scheduling MAC protocol. This protocol can optimize bandwidth allocation by letting the older packet to be transmitted preferentially. To improve channel utilization, multiple packets are allowed to be transmitted in each data transmission round. Simulation results have confirmed that our protocol can achieve excellent performance owing to its core idea of joint bandwidth optimization and MAC.
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Liao et al. (2015) studied this question.
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