• 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 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 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 Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.631-639
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• 2014

Recently, research on Media Access Control (MAC) techniques for underwater acoustic communication has been conducted actively. For successful acoustic communication in underwater conditions, development of environmentally adaptive MAC techniques, which is taking narrow bandwidth, distance, depth, noise level, salinity, multipath and etc into account, is an especially important work. In this paper, knowledge based system is introduced not only to obtain adaptive and optimal communication parameters but also increase network efficiency and availability by requesting change of MAC techniques based on decisions from knowledge-based system Smart Decision Block (SDB). Computer simulations were also conducted to verify the performance of the proposed system in underwater conditions.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2007.06a
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• pp.213-216
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• 2007

The paper deals with a approach to underwater acoustic based Ad-hoc communication, which allows major design strategies for Media Access Control (MAC) within a group of the autonomous underwater vehicles(AUV). The proposed MAC aims at deploying AUV-centric star topology, which minimizes overhead of sensor nodes and improves energy-efficiency. Furthermore, that is also well under long and unknown propagation delays of the underwater acoustic medium. The implemented MAC protocol makes it easier to achieve frame synchronization than TDMA due to deploying localized schedule time, in addition to saving energy consumption by letting nodes sleep. It is also superior to MACA and MACAW in terms of propagation delay. This scalable centralized protocol has the potential to serve as a primer for development of MAC protocol for future underwater acoustic based ad-hoc networks.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.97-103
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• 2008

T-Lohi, a MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks, has been designed to support dense networks consisting of short-range acoustic modems. However when T-Lohi is applied to large networks in which multi-hop routing is necessary, it suffers a lot of packet collisions due to the hidden terminal problem. To combat this problem, we propose a new MAC protocol which employs RTS/CTS handshaking. To our knowledge, this protocol is the first to adopt both a tone-based approach and RTS/CTS handshaking for dense underwater acoustic sensor networks. Simulation results show that this new protocol drastically reduces packet collisions while achieving good network utilization.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.75-83
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocol, named underwater multi-channel MAC protocol (UMMAC), for underwater acoustic networks (UANs). UMMAC is a split phase and reservation based multi-channel MAC protocol which enables hosts to utilize multiple channels via a channel allocation and power control algorithm (CAPC). In UMMAC, channel information of neighboring nodes is gathered via exchange of control packets. With such information, UMMAC allows for as many parallel transmissions as possible while avoiding using extra time slot for channel negotiation. By running CAPC algorithm, which aims at maximizing the network's capacity, users can allocate their transmission power and channels in a distributed way. The advantages of the proposed protocol are threefold: 1) Only one transceiver is needed for each node; 2) based on CAPC, hosts are coordinated to negotiate the channels and control power in a distributed way; 3) comparing with existing RTS/CTS MAC protocols, UMMAC do not introduce new overhead for channel negotiation. Simulation results show that UMMAC outperforms Slotted floor acquisition multiple access (FAMA) and multi-channel MAC (MMAC) in terms of network goodput (50% and 17% respectively in a certain scenario). Furthermore, UMMAC can lower the end-to-end delay and achieves a lower energy consumption compared to Slotted FAMA and MMAC.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.258-268
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• 2011

Underwater acoustic sensor networks can be used disaster prevention and environmental monitoring systems in underwater environments. Because, the underwater environment is different from the ground, the long propagation delay, low transfer rates and limited bandwidth characteristics should be considered. In this, paper will propose the MAC protocol that allocates time slot into each node according to priority policy through the period of contention-free slot reservation in underwater acoustic sensor networks in order to avoid collision and minimize energy consumption waste. We perform mathematical analysis to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol with regard to the collision probability, the energy consumption by collision, throughput and channel utilization. We compare the proposed protocol with the conventional protocol, and the performance results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the conventional protocol.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.344-347
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• 2011

Unlike a terrestrial wireless sensor network which uses radio waves, UWASN(Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network) relies on acoustic waves. There are lots of ongoing researches for long latency and limited bandwidth of underwater sensor network by using acoustic wave. Packets transferred by node often colide in underwater sensor network due to long latency. To solve this kind of problem, in general, Back-off scheme which is used in wireless network is used. However, fixed Slot-time according to node allocation generates useless time delay, and this lowers network performance. In this thesis, active setting technique of Slot-time is proposed, and applied for already studied MAC protocol. At the conclusion, it was proved that the MAC protocol using the proposed scheme has better performance than existing MAC protocol as a result comparison.