Review of ALOHA-based MAC Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks.

Document Type : Research Studies

Authors

1 Eng. at Computer Science and Engineering Dept., Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University, Egypt.

2 Professor at Computer Science and Engineering Dept., Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University, Egypt.

3 Professor at Computer Science and Engineering Dept., Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University, Egypt

4 Assistant Professor at Computer and Control Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Tanta University, Egypt and Department of Information Technology, College of Computer, Qassim University, Saudi Arabia

5 Associate Professor at Computer Science and Engineering Dept., Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University, Egypt

Abstract

The aquatic environment has become clearer and more controllable since Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) intervened to detect them, because underwater wireless sensor networks are efficiently providing and supporting many civilian and military applications, and many have been decomposed and extracted for helping to avoid falling into many problems, causing many physical and economic losses.  Media Access Control (MAC) protocol plays a fit role to enhance the performance of the network which helps to quickly accomplish the tasks that are required from the network and without additional cost. Low and limited bandwidth, energy, limited memory, long and variable propagation delay, and high bit error rate are some challenges that face the designing of the MAC protocol for UWSNs. ALOHA protocol is one of the most popular MAC protocols.  In this article, we focus on providing a review of the state of art of the most recent developments of ALOHA protocols for UWSNs from recent literature. These protocols are P-ALOHA, S-ALOHA, ALOHA–CS, ALOHA-AN, BUFFERED-ALOHA, SLOTTED-CS-ALOHA, VI-ALOHA, L-ALOHA, ST-SLOTTED-CS-ALOHA, MODIFIED-SLOTTED-ALOHA, SLOTTED-BUFFERING-ALOHA, and BUFFERING_SLOTTED_ALOH.  A discussion of the characteristics and restrictions of every ALOHA protocol in addition to explaining comparisons among all these protocols according to different performance metrics is also presented in this paper. The performance metrics used are the average delay, the energy consumption ratio, the number of dropped nodes, and the throughput ratio.

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