Performance of p-persistent slotted Aloha for underwater sensor networks

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) are deployed to monitor a specific underwater area and nodes communicate using acoustic waves. The long propagation delays of acoustic signal make Media Access Control (MAC) a big challenge, which significantly impacts the performance of the network. Since MAC protocol is a big concern for UASNs, it attracts a lot of research efforts. Although there are plenty of MAC protocols designed for terrestrial networks, it is difficult and challenging to apply them to UASNs especially for multi-hop UASNs. Simple protocols such as Aloha become popular for UASNs. As a continuous work of our previous study, we present the performance of two variants of multi-hop p-persistent slotted ALOHA protocol in a more complex underwater network. The analysis presented in this paper can be used to provide guidance for configuring multi-hop UASNs.