12. Efficient Design of Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks Communication for Delay Sensitive Applications over Multi-hop

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) play a critical role in the remote monitoring of a wide range of time-sensitive underwater applications, such as in the oil/gas pipeline to avoid oil spills. In this type of application, the transmission of collected information to the onshore infrastructure within a period of time is critical. Despite the advantages of UASNs over the limitations of Terrestrial Wireless Sensor Networks (TWSNs), the applicability of UASNs in different use-cases requires further investigation. In this paper, we investigate different MAC protocols and study the impact of non-environmental factors that may degrade performance. We simulate different MAC protocol approaches based on available underwater commercial modems to find the most efficient MAC protocol approach for the oil/gas industry based on core performance metrics. Our extensive simulation results show that the contention-based random access approach is the most suitable for time-sensitive application where the Network Size (NS) followed by Network Load (NL), Data Rate (DR), and Packet Size (PS), respectively have the strongest impact on delay.