A Distributed Scheduling Algorithm for Underwater Acoustic Networks With Large Propagation Delays

作者：Zeng Huacheng^*; Hou Y Thomas; Shi Yi; Lou Wenjing; Kompella Sastry; Midkiff Scott F

来源：IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2017, 65(3): 1131-1145.

DOI：10.1109/TCOMM.2017.2647940

• Underwater acoustic networks
• interference alignment
• distributed scheduling algorithm
• large propagation delays

Underwater acoustic (UWA) networks are a key form of communications for human exploration and activities in the oceanographic space of the earth. A fundamental issue of UWA communications is large propagation delays due to water medium, which has posed a grand challenge in UWA network protocol design. Conventional wisdom of addressing this issue is to live with this disadvantage by inserting a guard interval to introduce immunity to propagation delays. Recent advances in interference alignment (IA) open up a new direction to address this issue and promise a great potential to improve network throughput by exploiting large propagation delays. In this paper, we investigate propagation delay-based IA (PD-IA) in multi-hop UWA networks. We first develop a set of simple constraints to characterize PD-IA feasible region at the physical layer. Based on the set of PD-IA constraints, we develop a distributed PD-IA scheduling algorithm to greedily maximize interference overlapping possibilities in a multi-hop UWA network. Simulation results show that the proposed PD-IA algorithm yields higher throughput than an idealized benchmark algorithm without propagation delays, indicating that large propagation delays are not adversarial but beneficial for network throughput performance.

• 出版日期2017-3