—This paper investigates fundamental performance limits of medium access control (MAC) protocols for particular underwater multi-hop sensor networks under a fair-access criterion requiring that sensors have an equal rate of underwater frame delivery to a base station. Tight upper bounds on network utilization and tight lower bounds on minimum time between samples are derived for fixed linear topology. The paper also examines the implication of the end-to-end performance bounds regarding the traffic rate and sensing time interval of individual sensors.
Yang Xiao, Miao Peng, John H. Gibson, Geoffrey G.