Project title: Cross-Layer Performance Enhancement of Wireless Networks
Since the last few decades, there has been an increasing interest to develop and utilise Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs). The most important reason of that is to improve ocean exploration and to support the demand for various time-critical civilian and military aquatic applications. Similar to other types of sensor networks, a UWSN consists of a variable number of sensors that are deployed in water to perform collaborative monitoring tasks over a given area. Unlike terrestrial sensor nodes that rely on radio signals to communicate with each other, UWSNs use the acoustic channel as the communication method. However, several features of aquatic communication make the MAC protocol design quite challenging compared to that of terrestrial networks:
- Long and variable propagation delay.
- Limited bandwidth.
- High bit error rate.
The aim of this research study is to develop efficient reservation-based collision-free MAC protocols to address and eliminate the consequences of these issues such as the spatial-temporal uncertainty, the hidden and exposed terminal problems.