ADCNC-MAC: asynchronous duty cycle with network-coding MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

To reduce the energy cost of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWSNs), the duty cycle (i.e., periodic wake-up and sleep) concept has been used in several medium access control (MAC) protocols. Although these protocols are energy efficient, they sacrifice bandwidth utilization, which leads to lower transmission rate. In order to solve this problem, asynchronous duty cycle with network-coding Asynchronous Duty Cycle with Network-Coding MAC (ADCNC-MAC) is proposed. It contains initialization of the MAC protocol phase and data transmission phase. In the first phase, we use an asynchronous duty cycle to find a rendezvous time for exchanging data. A strategy to select network coder nodes is presented to confirm the number of network coder nodes and distribution in the network coder layer. In the data transmission phase, the network coder nodes transmit using the proposed network-coding-based algorithm and a higher volume of packet will be transmitted to the Sink with the same number of transmissions. Simulation results show that ADCNC-MAC achieves higher power efficiency, improves packet delivery ratio (PDR), and network throughput.