ScholarWorks@성균관대학교

초록

This paper proposes a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol tailored for underwater swarmed AUV networks (USANs). Designed to address the challenges of acoustic communication such as long propagation delays and limited bandwidth, the proposed protocol adopts a contention-free, delay-aware time scheduling mechanism. It introduces a hierarchical frame structure with area-based slot partitioning and propagation delay-aware slot assignment to ensure collision-free and low-latency communication. A deterministic scheduling algorithm assigns transmission offsets based on sorted propagation delays, promoting fairness and scalability across multiple AUV swarms. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared to AB-MAC, AST-TDMA, TDMA, and slotted-ALOHA, the proposed MAC protocol reduces end-to-end delay by over 80%, increases uplink channel utilization up to 5× (exceeding 50%), and maintains a retransmission overhead ratio as low as 1.5 under heavy traffic conditions. Moreover, it achieves a propagation-aware delay factor close to 1.0, indicating near-optimal delay behavior. These results confirm the protocol’s effectiveness for reliable and efficient communication in dense USANs.

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