Abstract: Mobile underwater networks with acoustic communications are confronted with several unique challenges such as long propagation delays, high transmission power consumption, and node mobility. In particular, slow signal propagation permits multiple packets to concurrently travel in the underwater channel, which must be exploited to improve the overall throughput. To this end, we propose the delay-aware opportunistic transmission scheduling (DOTS) protocol that uses passively obtained local information (i.e., neighbouring nodes’ propagation delay map and their expected transmission schedules) to increase the chances of concurrent transmissions while reducing the likelihood of collisions. Our extensive simulation results document that DOTS outperforms existing solutions and provides fair medium access even with node mobility.

Key Words: Underwater, AUV, medium access control, opportunistic transmission, CSMA