Abstract

Underwater Acoustic Wireless Sensor Networks (UAWSN) use acoustic communication for transmitting data. High bit error rate, long propagation delay and limited bandwidth in underwater harsh environment are big issues for designing wireless sensor networks for many applications including ocean monitoring. Another consideration in UWASN is energy constraint. Similar to other wireless sensor networks the design process of energy and efficient bandwidth and also propagation-delay-aware MAC protocols are great challenges in UWASN. In this paper, the performance of three underwater MAC protocols for underwater environment, R-MAC, Slotted FAMA and UWAN-MAC are evaluated. Throughput, energy consumption and packet drop rate are those parameters which are considered for evaluating their performances. These protocols are implemented in Aqua-Sim, an NS-2 based simulator for underwater sensor networks. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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