A Hierarchical Time Division Multiple Access Medium Access Control Protocol for Clustered Underwater Acoustic Networks

A hierarchical time division multiple access (HTDMA) medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed for clustered mobile underwater acoustic networks. HTDMA consists of two TDMA scheduling protocols (i.e., TDMA1 and TDMA2) in order to accommodate mobile underwater nodes (UNs). TDMA1 is executed among surface stations (e.g., buoys) using terrestrial wireless communication in order to share mobility information obtained from UNs which move cluster to cluster. TDMA2 is executed among UNs, which send data to their surface station as a cluster head in one cluster. By sharing mobility information, a surface station can instantaneously determine the number of time slots in a TDMA2 frame up to as many as the number of UNs which is currently residing in its cluster. This can enhance delay and channel utilization performance by avoiding the occurrence of idle time slots. We analytically investigate the delay of HTDMA, and compare it with that of wellknown contention-free and contention-based MAC protocols, which are TDMA and Slotted-ALOHA, respectively. It is shown that HTDMA remarkably decreases delay, compared with TDMA and Slotted-ALOHA.