• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.1259-1268
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• 2019

Recently, Communication media have been developed for the underwater communication in underwater environments where the underwater communication failures occur frequently. Although the underwater communication by one medium is not stable due to the influence of the underwater environment, the use of various communication media can complement each other and so this makes the underwater communication more stable. For this reason, this paper proposes approaches to the design and implementation of integrated MAC for complementing individual unstable underwater communications. In addition this paper presents the comparison and analysis on each of the proposed approaches so to be able to provide guidelines to designers and implementers of integrated MAC.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.157-166
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• 2011

As underwater environment monitoring system's interest has increased, the research is proceeding about underwater acoustic sensor network. Underwater sensor network can be applicable to many fields, such as underwater environment monitoring, underwater resource exploration, oceanic data collection, military purposes, etc. It is essential to define the PHY-MAC protocol for revitalization of the underwater acoustic sensor network which is available utilization in a variety of fields. However, underwater acoustic sensor network has to implement by consideration of underwater environmental characteristics, such as limited bandwidth, multi-path, fading, long propagation delay caused by low acoustic speed. In this paper, we define frequency of adjusted PHY protocol, network topology, MAC protocol, PHY-MAC interface, data frame format by consideration of underwater environmental characteristics. We also present system configuration of our implementation and evaluate performance based on our implementation with test in real underwater field.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.180-188
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• 1997

This paper proposes a new efficient MAC(Media Access Control) protocol to establish the ultrasonic communication network for underwater vehicles, which ensures a certain level of maximum throughput regardless of the propagation delay of ultrasonic and allows fast data transmission through the multiple ultrasonic communication channel. A MAC protocol for underwater communication network that allows 'peer-to-peer' communication between a surface ship and multiple underwater systems is designed, and the proposed control protocol is implemented for its verification.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.1068-1072
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• 2018

In underwater communications, there are many challenges due to energy limitations, long propagation delay, low data rate, and high power loss, unlike terrestrial RF communications. Especially, the propagation delay of underwater acoustic channel is five orders of magnitude higher than in electro-magnetic terrestrial channels due to the low speed of sound(1,500m/s). Thus, the MAC protocols for terrestrial communications are not suitable for underwater network. In this paper, we studied the considerations for MAC protocol in underwater acoustic channel. Here, we concentrated on CSMA based MAC protocols. From the results, we confirmed that the number of control packets has an important effect on the performance in underwater environment. These results would be useful in designing MAC protocols for underwater acoustic communications.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.2088-2096
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• 2009

This paper deals with hybrid MAC protocol design for underwater acoustic networks. The proposed MAC protocol has the cluster structure with a master node and slave nodes, and the hybrid network structure that combines a contention free period based on TDMA(Time Division Multiple Access) with a contention period. The suggested MAC protocol has a beacon packet for supervising network, a guard period between time slots for packet collision, time tag for estimation of propagation delay with a master node, the time synchronization of nodes, entering and leaving of network, and the communication method among nodes. In this paper, we adapt the proposed hybrid MAC protocol to AUV network, that is the representative mobile device of underwater acoustic network, and verify this protocol is applicable in real underwater acoustic network environment.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.76-89
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a MAC(Media Access Control) protocol based on flexible RWT(RTS Waiting Time) for underwater mobile ad-hoc networks with a three-way handshaking mechanism. This protocol can solve a problem of collision between RTS(Request-To-Send) and CTS(Clear-To-Send) packets in existing MACA(Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance) protocol. This proposed MAC protocol is also an effective protocol which can apply to underwater mobile ad-hoc networks in a real field by using implementable technologies. We set flexible RTS Waiting Time called RWT, considering various characteristics of underwater environment. It is possible to support variable network size according to node mobility. Finally, we conduct a performance evaluation between proposed MAC protocol and existing MACA based MAC protocol through practical implementation and experiment. As a result, we verify the superiority of our proposed MAC protocol in terms of throughput, packet drop rate, average transmission time, energy consumption and channel utilization.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.88-96
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• 2011

Underwater acoustic communication is applicable in various areas, such as ocean data collection, undersea exploration and development, tactical surveillance, etc. Thus, robot control system construction used for underwater-robot like AUV or ROV is essential in these areas. In this paper, we propose the Message Merging MAC($M^2$-MAC) protocol, which is suitable for real time robot control system, considering energy efficiency in important parts of underwater acoustic sensor network constitution. In this proposed MAC protocol, gateway node receives the data from robot nodes according to the time slots that were allotted previously. And messages delivered from base-station are generated to one MAC frame by buffering process. Finally, generated MAC frames are broadcasted to all robot nodes in the cluster. Our suggested MAC protocol can also be hybrid MAC protocol, which is successful blend of contention based and contention-free based protocol through relevant procedure with Maintenance&Sleep (M&S) period, when new nodes join and leave as an orphan. We propose mathematical analysis model concerned about End-to-End delay and energy consumption, which is important factor in constructing real-time robot control system. We also verify the excellence of performance according to comparison of existing MAC protocols with our scheme.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.211-217
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a bidirectional full duplex MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol for underwater acoustic networks. An underwater sensor node can set a back-off timer according to the priority of transmission. When the back-off timer expires, the underwater sensor node acquires a transmission opportunity. If a source node wants to send data to a destination node, it broadcasts RTS (Request-To-Send) including ID of the destination node to neighbor nodes. The destination node receiving RTS sends CTS (Clear-To-Send) to the source node to inform the bidirectional full duplex communication. After the source node receives CTS, the source node and the destination node can send the data to each other. In the underwater environment, the existing MAC protocol may take a lot of time for successful transmission of data due to long underwater propagation delay. On the other hand, the proposed bidirectional full duplex MAC protocol improves the throughput by shortening the time for successful transmission of data. In this paper, we analyze the throughput of the proposed bidirectional full duplex MAC protocol. In addition, we show that the proposed bidirectional full duplex MAC protocol has better performance in the presence of the long underwater propagation delay compared with existing MAC protocols for underwater environments.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.3-9
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• 2017

Due to difficulties of continuous electric power provision to underwater communication nodes, the efficient power usage is highly required in underwater network protocol. In this paper, we studied the energy efficient MAC(Medium Access Control) protocol for underwater network supporting mobile nodes such as UUV(Unmanned Underwater Vehicle) and AUV(Autonomous Underwater Vehicle). The mobile nodes could waste the electric power in vain when the receiver moves out of the radio propagation coverage during the data exchange and thus the transmitted data fails in reaching the receiver. Expecially, such a failure is much more obvious in underwater acoustic channels since the propagation delay is about $10^5$ times slower than in terrestrial radio channels. This proposed mobility-MAC controls the data dropping stochastically in the Dropping Zone by considering the receiver's location and moving velocity. In conclusion, this selective dropping method not only improves latency and throughput by reducing invalid droppings but also boosts power efficiency by valid droppings.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.97-107
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• 2013

Underwater wireless communication systems can be useful for underwater environment observation, catastrophe prevention, ocean resources exploration, ocean organism research, vessel sinking exploration, and so on. However, unlike terrestrial wireless communication, underwater wireless communication should consider factors such as long propagation delay, limited transmission capacity, high bit-error rate due to potential loss in power, ambient noise, man-made noise, multi-path, etc., because of the inherent characteristics of water. Thus, in this paper, we propose a suitable media access control(MAC) protocol that applies a combination of the ALOHA MAC protocol and the CSMA/CA MAC protocol to underwater environment. We further propose a mathematical analysis model to evaluate performance. We also verify performance improvement in the proposed scheme in comparison with existing MAC protocols.