• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.50-60
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• 2015

A Block-Time-Bounded Time Division Multiple Access (BTB-TDMA) medium access control protocol, which estimates the propagation delay of nodes according to their location and moving velocity information, has been proposed for underwater acoustic networks. BTB-TDMA provides nodes with their transmission schedules by a time block that is a time unit, newly designed for BTB-TDMA. In this paper, we investigate how the receiver collision, that is induced by the asymmetry between node's uplink and downlink propagation delay due to its mobility, affects the performance of BTB-TDMA. To do this, we analytically obtain the collision rate, the channel access delay, and the channel utilization by considering the asymmetry of propagation delay. Then, simulations are extensively performed with respect to the length of a time block by varying the number of nodes, the network range, and the node's velocity. Thus, the simulation results can suggest performance criteria to determine the optimal length of a time block which minimizes the collision rate and concurrently maximizes the channel access delay and the channel utilization.

• 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.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.37C no.12
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• pp.1328-1336
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• 2012

Compared to terrestrial RF communications, underwater acoustic communications have several limitations such as limited bandwidth, high level of fading effects, and a large underwater propagation delay. In this paper, in order to tackle those limitations of underwater communications and to make it possible to form a large underwater monitoring systems, we propose a hierarchical underwater network architecture, which consists of underwater sensors, clusterheads, underwater/surface sink nodes, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). In the proposed architecture, for the maximization of packet delivery ratio and the minimization of underwater sensor's energy consumption, a hybrid routing protocol is used. More specifically, cluster members use Tree based routing to transmit sensing data to clusterheads. AUVs on optimal trajectory movements collect the aggregated data from clusterhead and finally forward the data to the sink node. Also, in order to minimize the maximum travel distance of AUVs, an Integer Linear Programming based algorithm is employed. Performance analysis through simulations shows that the proposed architecture can achieve a higher data delivery ratio and lower energy consumption than existing routing schemes such as gradient based routing and geographical forwarding. Start after striking space key 2 times.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.17-22
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• 2011

The underwater environments are quite different from the terrestrial ones in terms of the communication channel and constrains. In underwater wireless sensor network, the probability of node failure is high because sensor nodes are deployed in more harsh environments than the ground based networks and moved by waves and currents. There are researches considering the communication environments of underwater to improve the data transmission throughput. In this paper, we present a checkpointing scheme of the cluster heads that recoveries from a cluster head failure quickly. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme enhances the reliability of the networks and more efficient in terms of the energy consumption and the recovery latency than without checkpointing.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.19-25
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• 2012

Underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) employ acoustic channels for communications. One of the main characteristics of the underwater acoustic channel is long propagation delay. Previously proposed MAC (medium access control) protocols for wireless sensor networks cannot be directly used in UWSNs due to the long propagation delay. The long propagation delay and uneven nodes deployments cause spatial fairness in UWSNs. Therefore, a new MAC protocol for UWSNs needs to be developed to provide efficient communications. In this paper, we propose an efficient MAC protocol in order to alleviate the fairness problem. In the proposed scheme, when a node receives a RTS packet, it does not immediately send back but delays a CTS packet. The node collects several RTS packets from source nodes during the delay time. It chooses one of the RTS packets based on the queue status information. And then, it sends a CTS packet to the source node which sent the chosen RTS packet. The performance of the proposed scheme is investigated via simulation. Simulation results show that our scheme is effective and alleviates the fairness problem.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39C no.3
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• pp.264-274
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• 2014

Time synchronization becomes a critical issue in underwater acoustic networks (UANets) because nodes cooperate together or individually work by communicating each other in diverse underwater applications. Compared with the time synchronization approaches in terrestrial networks, several intrinsic limitations of UANets (e.g., the unavailability of GPS, long propagation delay, mobility due to currents, limited energy consumption, or low data rate) need to be considered in synchronizing the timing among underwater nodes. For the purpose of developing more efficient time synchronization protocols for UANets, we review the existing approaches, which estimate both the clock offset and the clock skew of underwater nodes. Finally, we outline the state-of-the art time synchronization protocols for UANets by comparing and summarizing them according to their synchronization characteristics.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.336-339
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• 2011

In the RTLS(Real Time Location Based System), in case of existing a number of moving target, extremely complecated data flow is can be occurred. In the network where single gateway exists, various data which was collected from sensor node is transmitted along the simple route as time goes by. In case of multi-gateway configuration, the collected data is transmitted through diverse routes rather than simple route. This kind of data causes jams on nodes and this brings down the performance of the network. Different from existing studies, in this thesis, MAC (Media Access Control) protocol which minimizes data collision between nodes and guarantees QoS(Quality of Service) is suggested, in order to communicate efficiently in multi-gateway underwater sensor network environment. In the suggested protocol, source node which wants to transmit data makes a channel reservation to a number of destination node using a RTS packet. Source node reserves a channel without collision, by scheduling CTS response time using expected delay information from neighbor nodes. Once the reservation is made, source node transmit data packet without collision. This protocol analyzes/estimates the performance compared to a method provided from existing studies via simulation. As a results of the analysis, it was comfirmed that the suggested method has better performance, such as efficiency and delay.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.11
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• pp.110-117
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• 2012

As the demand for underwater systems providing pollution monitoring, marine ecosystem observation, surveillance monitoring is increased, acoustic modem for short-range underwater communication is spotlighted as one of significant research topics. Typically, in shallow water, it is so hard to analyze acoustic wave which undergoes spreading, absorption, reflection and scattering through transmission that there are limited advanced results. Furthermore, in order for the modem to be loaded in a fixed node or a moving vehicle in shallow water, its size should be small enough. In this paper, we address underwater acoustic channel model and design and implement an efficient micro acoustic modem which is adequate for short-range underwater communication. The developed modem is verified in a lake by varying working range and data rate up to 500 meters and 2 kbps, respectively.

• 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.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39C no.4
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• pp.351-361
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• 2014

Compared to a terrestrial communication, the high BER(Bit Error Ratio) and low channel bandwidth are the major factor of throughput degradation due to characteristics of underwater channel. Therefore, a MAC protocol must be designed to solve this problem in UWASNs(Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks). MAC protocols for UWASNs can be classified into two major types according to the contention scheme(Contention-free scheme and Contention-based scheme). In large scale of sensor networks, a Contention-based scheme is commonly used due to time-synchronize problem of Contention-free scheme. In the contention-based scheme, Each node contends with neighbor nodes to access network channel by using Back-off algorithm. But a Slot-Time of Back-off algorithm has long delay times which are cause of decrease network throughput. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to solve this problem. The proposed scheme uses variable Slot-Time instead of fixed Slot-Time. Each node measures propagation delay from neighbors which are used by Slot-time. Therefore, Slot-Times of each node are optimized by considering node deployment. Consequently, the wasted-time for Back-off is reduced and network throughput is improved. A new mac protocol performance in throughput and delay is assessed through NS3 and compared with existing MAC protocol(MACA-U). Finally, it was proved that the MAC protocol using the proposed scheme has better performance than existing MAC protocol as a result of comparison.