CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Underwater sensor networks are becoming an important field of research, because oftheir everyday increasing application scope. Examples of their application areas are environmentaland pollution monitoring (mainly oil spills), oceanographic data collection, support for submarinegeolocalization, ocean sampling and early tsunamis alert. The challenge of performing underwatercommunications is well known, provided that radio signals are useless in this medium, and a wiredsolution is too expensive. Therefore, the sensors in these networks transmit their information usingacoustic signals that propagate well under water. This data transmission type not only brings anopportunity, but also several challenges to the implementation of these networks, e.g., in termsof energy consumption, data transmission and signal interference. In order to help advance theknowledge in the design and implementation of these networks for monitoring underwater spaces,this paper proposes a MAC protocol for acoustic communications between the nodes, based ona self-organized time division multiple access mechanism. The proposal was evaluated usingsimulations of a real monitoring scenario, and the obtained results are highly encouraging.