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Comparative Analysis of MAC Protocols and Strategies for Underwater Applications

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Abstract

This research focuses on the comparison of the throughput performance of MAC protocols designed for underwater acoustic networks. Our emphasis was to study the key features of the existing MAC protocols for underwater acoustic communications and provide analytical analysis where feasible. We compared some selected underwater MAC protocols like UAN-ALOHA, CSMA, MACA, MACA-EA and S-FAMA and analyzed their throughputs. We chose to evaluate possible improvements in the throughput of S-FAMA by using the retry mechanism. We found the retry mechanism only showed marginal improvement in the throughput. The proposed mechanisms may not have practical efficacy, however, this mechanism may be helpful in saving energy of the sensor nodes by preventing the repetition of the entire transmission cycle.

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Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to all those in the department of Telecommunication Engineering, University of Malaga, Spain who contributed towards the success of this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Telecommunication Engineering, University of Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    Seema Ansari, Javier Poncela & Pablo Otero

  2. Institute of Business Management, Korangi Creek, Karachi, 75190, Pakistan

    Seema Ansari

  3. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Institute of Business Management, Karachi, Pakistan

    Adeel Ansari

Authors
  1. Seema Ansari
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  2. Javier Poncela
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  3. Pablo Otero
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  4. Adeel Ansari
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Correspondence to Seema Ansari.

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Ansari, S., Poncela, J., Otero, P. et al. Comparative Analysis of MAC Protocols and Strategies for Underwater Applications. Wireless Pers Commun 95, 391–409 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-016-3899-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-016-3899-z

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