An Enhanced Full-Duplex MAC Protocol for an Underwater Acoustic Network

The existing half-duplex medium access control protocols take longer time to transmit and receive successful data packets, due to longer propagation delays. Therefore, we proposed an Enhanced Full-Duplex Medium Access Control protocol for the underwater acoustic network. The proposed protocol increases throughputs by decreasing the time for successful data transmission. The proposed protocol sets a backoff timer to access the transmission opportunity by transmitting the ID based RTS control packet to the target destination node. The target destination sends back the CTS control packet containing the data transmission and ID information, then both immediately exchange the data with each other, consuming less transmission time while performing FD communication. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol with respect to increase in number of underwater sensor nodes and payload size. Simulation results proved that the proposed protocol significantly increased the throughputs, compared to the existing convention medium access control protocols.