Improving energy efficiency of underwater acoustic sensor networks using transmission power control: A cross-layer approach

Abstract

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UW-ASNs) have found a wide range of applications from ocean monitoring to military surveillance. The underwater environment is energy constrained and hence it is very important to improve the life expectancy of sensor nodes. In this paper we propose a new MAC protocol (RMAC-PC) which uses transmission power control to enhance the energy efficiency. The protocol is developed as an extension to the RMAC protocol which schedules the transmissions of control and data packets depending on the latency calculations. Here, we utilize a cross-layer interaction between the MAC and physical layers to compute the optimum transmit power based on inter-nodal distance. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.