Abstract
The transmission speed of acoustic waves in water is much slower than that of radio waves in terrestrial wireless sensor networks. Thus, the propagation delay in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASN) is much greater. Longer propagation delay leads to complicated communication and collision problems. To solve collision problems, some studies have proposed waiting mechanisms; however, long waiting mechanisms result in low bandwidth utilization. To improve throughput, this study proposes a slotted medium access control protocol to enhance bandwidth utilization in UASNs. The proposed mechanism increases communication by exploiting temporal and spatial resources that are typically idle in order to protect communication against interference. By reducing wait time, network performance and energy consumption can be improved. A performance evaluation demonstrates that when the data packets are large or sensor deployment is dense, the energy consumption of proposed protocol is less than that of existing protocols as well as the throughput is higher than that of existing protocols.