Energy-Efficient OR-based MAC Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks

Since the underwater communication faces many challenging issues such as unreliable links, insufficient bandwidth, and long propagation delay etc., current MAC protocols of terrestrial wireless sensor network (WSN) are no longer suitable for underwater sensor networks (UWSNs). In this work, we propose an underwater OR-based MAC protocol (UWOR-MAC) by jointly considering the idea of Opportunistic Routing and the characteristics of UWSNs. Specifically, to improve the channel utilization, we construct an Event Relationship Graph (ERG) for estimating the successful probability of multi-packets being transmitted concurrently. The simulation results show that UWOR-MAC outperforms existing schemes in terms of throughput and energy consumption.