Accessibility statement

Full-duplex MAC protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs) have recently gained widespread attention as a result of technological breakthroughs in sensor technology, vehicular technology and underwater communication, thereby creating a new research area that has potential for many important applications. Establishing communication among nodes underwater is a challenging task because of the peculiar characteristics associated with the underwater channel. More importantly, medium access control becomes very difficult due to very long and variable propagation delays, low bandwidth, multi-path propagation, Doppler spread, high attenuation and noise. As a result, designing a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for UANs in the presence of the aforementioned underwater channel characteristics is difficult and traditional approaches are either unsuitable, or provide poor throughput, latency and energy efficiency performance.

Various MAC protocols that operate in a half-duplex fashion have been developed in order to improve network performance in UANs, however, quality of service and energy efficiency limitations still persist. Recent advances in self-interference cancellation for in-band full-duplex communication (a phenomenon whereby network nodes can transmit and receive data packets simultaneously within the same band) have created a new opportunity for improving spectral use and throughput which can solve some of the MAC layer problems thereby, potentially improving network performance by providing higher throughput, increased data rate, reduced latency, and reduction in hidden and exposed terminal problems. In this vain, this research aims to develop an ALOHA based full-duplex MAC protocol for UANs. Initial objectives include implementation of a full-duplex ALOHA protocol and performance evaluation with realistic channel models based on Bellhop acoustic field computation. In the longer term, the full-duplex ALOHA techniques will be designed for different types of network topologies, including specific application case studies.

Members

  • Aliyu Ahmed
  • Paul Mitchell
  • Yuriy Zakharov

Funding

Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF)

Dates

Jan 2018 - Dec 2020

Research