• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2011.10a
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• pp.633-636
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• 2011

The paper deals with the performance of contention-based medium access control (MAC) protocols for underwater sensor networks. We extensively analyze the number of received-packets and the end-to-end delay of ALOHA, CSMA, CSMA-RTS-CTS and CSMA-RTS-CTS-ACK protocols using a Qualnet underwater network simulator which accommodates diverse underwater acoustic channel environments. Using simulation results, we support an engineering table to determine an adequate contention-based MAC protocol for underwater sensor networks.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2011.11a
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• pp.97-100
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• 2011

Underwater Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks have become an important area of research over the recent decades. Designing an underwater network, especially a media access control (MAC) protocol, faces many challenges due to the peculiarities of underwater environment. One of the most important problems is resulted from long and variable propagation delay of the acoustic wave. In this paper, we propose a new method, namely Dynamic Timeout over Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (DT/MACA), which is designed to handle long and high variable propagation delay in underwater acoustic sensor networks. In this proposed method, the difference timeout intervals are evaluated and applied to each network transmission. Simulation results show that our work not only improves the network throughput, but also decreases the unnecessary retransmission and end-to-end delay.

• Information and Communications Magazine
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• v.33 no.8
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• pp.71-81
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• 2016

본 논문에서는 수중 통신을 위한 매체 접속 제어(Medium Access Control: MAC) 프로토콜에 대한 연구 동향을 소개한다. 먼저 수중 음향 센서 네트워크(Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network: UWASN)와 수중 음향 채널의 특성을 소개하고 이로 인한 수중 MAC 프로토콜 설계 시 고려 사항에 대해 정리한다. 본 논문에서는 수중 MAC 프로토콜을 크게 비경쟁(contention-free) 기반과 경쟁 기반(contention-based) 프로토콜로 나누어 각각의 대표적인 프로토콜들에 대한 핵심 동작 원리에 대해 설명한다. 마지막으로 MAC 프로토콜을 실제 해양 환경에 구현하기 위한 고려 사항에 대해 정리한다.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.1-10
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• 2021

The interest in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs), along with the rapid development of underwater industries, has increased. To operate UWASNs efficiently, it is important to adopt well-designed medium access control (MAC) protocols that prevent collisions and allow the sharing of resources between nodes efficiently. On the other hand, underwater channels suffer from a narrow bandwidth, long propagation delay, and low data rate, so existing terrestrial node pairing schemes for non orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) cannot be applied directly to underwater environments. Therefore, a multi-dimensional node pairing scheme is proposed to consider the unique underwater channel in UWASNs. Conventional NOMA schemes have considered the channel quality only in node pairing. Unlike previous schemes, the proposed scheme considers the channel gain and many other features, such as node fairness, traffic load, and the age of data packets to find the best node-pair. In addition, the sender employs a list of candidates for node-pairs rather than path loss to reduce the computational complexity. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme by considering the fairness factor with 23.8% increases in throughput, 28% decreases in latency, and 5.7% improvements in fairness at best.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39C no.6
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• pp.457-465
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• 2014

This paper introduces a test bed for communication protocol schemes of underwater acoustic sensor network, and also shows experimental results obtained from the test bed. As a testing protocol, carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) is evaluated on underwater acoustic channel. A sensor node is equipped with a DSP control board of ATmega2560 and a commercial underwater modem produced by Benthos. The control board not only manipulates a GPS signal to acquire the information of location and time, but also controls the underwater modem to operate according to the procedure designed for a given testing protocol. Whenever any event takes place such as exchanging control/data packets between underwater modems and acquiring location and timing information, each sensor node reports them through radio frequency (RF) air interface to a central station located on the ground. The four kinds of packets for CSMA/CA, RTS(Request To Send), CTS(Clear to Send), DATA, ACK(Acknowledgement) are designed according to the underwater communication environment and are analyzed through the lake experiment from the point of feasibility of CSMA/CA in underwater acoustic communications.

• 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.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.4
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• pp.106-114
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• 2015

Despite a series of various developments in underwater acoustic sensor networks, there are still occasions of loss of connection over the network. Because sufficient amounts of drawbacks causing disconnections posed particularly in the middle of connection over the network emerge in the ocean environment, there is a need of new testing mechanism for underwater acoustic networks. In this paper, we proposed to investigate the most vital parts of the network deployment whether they function well in order, without any failure so as to identify where exactly communication process problems and failures are. We introduce step-wised out-test mechanism for UWASNS and accomplished the mechanism by implementing experiments and rigorously checked all the underwater devices utilizing out-test function. Experimental results and out-test function are evinced by implementing, in order to explain our system and conclude with possible future improvements.

• 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.2
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• pp.199-208
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• 2014

Code division multiple access (CDMA) is one of the promising medium access control (MAC) schemes for underwater acoustic sensor networks because of its robustness against frequency-selective fading and high frequency-reuse efficiency. As a way of performance evaluation, sea or lake experiment has been employed along with computer simulation.. In this study, we design the underwater CDMA forward-link transceiver and evaluate the feasibility aginst harsh underwater acoustic channel in water-tank first. Then, based on the water-tank experiment results, we improved the transceiver and showed the improvements in a lake experiment. A pseudo random noise code acquisition process is added for phase error correction before decoding the user data by means of a Walsh code in the receiver. Interleaving and convolutional channel coding scheme are also used for performance improvement. Experimental results show that the multiplexed data is recovered by means of demultiplexing at receivers with error-free in case of two users while with less than 15% bit error rate in case of three and four users.