Maximizing network coverage in a multichannel short-range underwater acoustic sensor network

In this paper, a Media Access Control (MAC) protocol is investigated for multichannel underwater acoustic sensor networks and a distributed channel allocation scheme is proposed for acoustic nodes equipped with a multichannel bi-directional transceiver. To ensure that a minimum of one channel is allocated for each transmitter-receiver pair, a novel distributed channel allocation scheme, the High Coverage High Fairness (HCHF) algorithm, is proposed. The algorithm requires the exchange of channel sensing information among neighbor nodes at the beginning of each transmission time slot. To compare HCHF and existing schemes, various performance metrics are assessed including spectrum utilization, coverage, fairness, and control packet overhead. Simulation results indicate that the HCHF scheme can improve the coverage and fairness in comparison to other schemes without sacrificing much on the spectrum utilization. The performance improvement of HCHF is constrained by a higher control message overhead, since local packet exchange between neighbor nodes is required to share spectrum sensing information. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.