Analysis of Throughput and Delay for an Underwater Multi-DATA Train Protocol with Multi-RTS Reception and Block ACK

We propose an underwater multi-DATA train protocol with multi-RTS reception and block ACK (BACK) for underwater acoustic sensor networks. Due to long underwater acoustic propagation delay, some RTS frames may not overlap at a sink node, even if the RTS frames were sent to the sink node simultaneously by different sensor nodes. We consider that our underwater sink node can recover these nonoverlapping RTS frames. Since our RTS frame contains ID of the RTS sending node and a timestamp, the sink node calculates the propagation delay between the RTS sending node and the sink node, then broadcasts a CTS frame. Since our CTS frame contains when each RTS sending node can transmit a DATA frame to the sink node, multiple DATA frames transmitted by different sensor nodes can be formed as a train at the sink node. We also propose an underwater BACK protocol which is analogous to our proposed underwater multi-DATA train protocol. We analyze normalized throughput and mean access delay of our proposed protocols and the conventional protocols. The analytical and simulation results show that our analysis is accurate and our proposed protocols outperform the conventional protocols. Our proposed protocol can shorten the delay and increase the throughput via the multi-DATA train, multi-RTS reception, and BACK.