LAUSR

Underwater acoustic sensor networks are an enabling technology for many applications. Long propagation delays and limited bandwidth of the acoustic channel place constraints on the trade-off between achievable end-to-end delay, channel utilization, and fairness. This paper provides new insights into the use of the combined free/demand assignment multiple access (CFDAMA) schemes. The CFDAMA can be classified as adaptive TDMA, where capacity is usually assigned on demand. The CFDAMA with round robin requests (CFDAMA-RRs) are shown to minimize end-to-end delay and maximize channel utilization underwater. It sustains fairness between nodes with minimum overhead and adapts to changes in the underwater channel and time-varying traffic requirements. However, its performance is heavily dependent on the network size. The major contribution of this paper is a new scheme employing the round robin request strategy in a systematic manner (CFDAMA-SRR). Comprehensive event-driven Riverbed simulations of a network deployed on the sea bed show that the CFDAMA-SRR outperforms its underlying scheme, CFDAMA-RR, especially when sensor nodes are widely spread. Considering node locations, the novel scheme has a bias against long delay demand assigned slots to enhance the performance of the CFDAMA-RR. The illustrative examples show good agreement between the analytical and simulation results.