A TDMA-based MAC protocol exploiting the near-far effect in underwater acoustic networks

A prime source of collisions in underwater acoustic communication networks (UWANs) is the so called near-far effect, where a node located farther from the receiver is jammed by a closer node. While common practice considers such situation as a challenge, in this paper we consider it as a resource, and use it to increase network throughput of spatial reuse time-division multiple access. We propose a transmission allocation algorithm that opportunistically utilizes information on occurrences of near-far scenarios in UWANs to maximize channel utilization. Numerical results show that, at a slight cost in terms of fairness, our scheduling solutions achieve higher throughput and lower transmission delay than benchmark spatial-reuse scheduling protocols. To allow the reproducibility of our results, we publish the implementation of our proposed algorithm.