A Comparative Study on MAC Protocols of an Underwater Surveillance System from QoS Perspective

Abstract

Underwater wireless sensor networks can be employed in a vast range of applications such as the underwater surveillance systems. The adoption of underwater wireless sensor networks by underwater surveillance systems has brought forward a new challenge of fulfilling the quality of service (QoS) requirements. Providing QoS support is a challenging issue due to the highly resource constrained nature of underwater wireless sensor nodes and the harsh operation environments. In this paper, we focus on the analysis of QoS parameters for underwater surveillance system MAC protocols. In this paper, we analyze QOS parameters of four MAC protocols: RMAC, Slotted FAMA, UWALOHA and AQTUWMAC in terms of energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio and average end to end delay in two different nodes deployment strategies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that compares MAC protocols in randomly deployment strategy and Octahedron placement strategy for underwater surveillance system. We have used the underwater wireless sensor network simulator Aqua-Sim to simulate the MAC protocols.