• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.40 no.8
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• pp.1631-1636
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• 2015

With the advance of wireless communication technology in terrestrial area, underwater communication is also evolving very fast from a simple point-to-point transmission to an elaborate networked communications. Underwater acoustic channel has quite different features comparing with the terrestrial radio channel in terms of propagation delay, Doppler shift, multipath, and path loss. Thus, existing technologies developed for terrestrial communication might not work properly in underwater channel. Especially medium access control (MAC) protocols which highly depend on propagation phenomenon should be newly designed for underwater network. CSMA/CA has drawn lots of attention as a candidate of underwater MAC protocol, since it is able to resolve a packet collision and the hidden node problem. However, a received signal could be degraded by the interferences from the nodes locating outside the receiver's propagation radius. In this paper, we study the effects of interference on the CSMA/CA based underwater network. We derived the SNR with the interference using the sonar equation and analyzed the degradation of the RTS/CTS effects. These results are compared with the terrestrial results to understand the differences. Finally we summarized the design considerations in CSMA/CA based underwater network.