A Hybrid Medium Access Control Protocol for Underwater Wireless Networks

Underwater networks allow investigation of many areas of the world not easily accessed by humans, but offer interesting challenges to device and protocol designers due to the unique channel conditions present when using acoustic communications. The high transmit power of acoustic transceivers makes the medium access protocol a primary focus point for reducing energy consumption in energy limited underwater devices. Scheduled protocols use very little power by eliminating collisions, but cannot adapt to changing traffic conditions in the same way as random protocols.