• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.22 no.6
• /
• pp.1-10
• /
• 2021

The interest in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs), along with the rapid development of underwater industries, has increased. To operate UWASNs efficiently, it is important to adopt well-designed medium access control (MAC) protocols that prevent collisions and allow the sharing of resources between nodes efficiently. On the other hand, underwater channels suffer from a narrow bandwidth, long propagation delay, and low data rate, so existing terrestrial node pairing schemes for non orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) cannot be applied directly to underwater environments. Therefore, a multi-dimensional node pairing scheme is proposed to consider the unique underwater channel in UWASNs. Conventional NOMA schemes have considered the channel quality only in node pairing. Unlike previous schemes, the proposed scheme considers the channel gain and many other features, such as node fairness, traffic load, and the age of data packets to find the best node-pair. In addition, the sender employs a list of candidates for node-pairs rather than path loss to reduce the computational complexity. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme by considering the fairness factor with 23.8% increases in throughput, 28% decreases in latency, and 5.7% improvements in fairness at best.