Short paper: Performance analysis of a MACA based protocol for adhoc underwater networks

Abstract

This paper presents novel performance analysis of a MACA-based MAC protocol for underwater networks. MACA is very popular in terrestrial radio networks (such as 802.11) and many papers have presented its performance analysis. However, previously published analysis of such protocols for radio wireless networks typically do not account for propagation delay, high detection and decoding errors that characterize underwater networks and also do not derive closed form expressions for essential metrics. Some analysis on similar protocols has been done for underwater networks as well but there are significant differences in protocol models and analysis methodology. The analysis in this paper incorporates these additional factors and we derive analytical closed form expressions for mean service time and throughput for such a protocol. The analytical results match simulation results well. We also present preliminary sea trial results of modem implementation of the protocol that match the analysis well. Copyright 2009 ACM.