Full-duplex medium access control protocol for linear underwater chain networks

This thesis investigates the performance improvements that can be realized with the application of full-duplex communication in Medium Access Control (MAC) schemes for linear underwater chain networks used for subsea pipeline monitoring. The study focuses specifically on the development of full-duplex MAC schemes in order to leverage full-duplex communication to significantly improve network performance in terms of throughput, latency, and monitoring rate while maintaining an acceptable Quality of service (QoS) for a reliable and efficient subsea pipeline monitoring system. The performance of the MAC schemes proposed in this thesis is evaluated using a BELLHOP based simulated underwater channel model under best-case network scenarios (short pipelines deployed on a small scale, 2 to 20 km pipelines) and worst-case network scenarios (long pipelines large scale cases, 200 to 1000 km pipelines).

The thesis presents a new strategy for applying the LTDA-MAC (Linear Transmit Delay Allocation) MAC protocol to the full-duplex multi-hop underwater chain network scenarios by enabling in-band simultaneous transmissions in order to accomplish effective packet scheduling and thereby improve the network performance (higher
throughput and lower latency). Furthermore, it proposes a new full-duplex linear transmit delay allocation MAC (FD-LTDA-MAC) protocol to further improve performance by redeveloping the traditional LTDA-MAC protocol to fully exploit full-duplex capabilities and to maximize spectrum reuse in order to achieve a higher monitoring rate, particularly for longer pipelines, by generating a more efficient packet scheduling in full-duplex underwater pipeline monitoring scenarios.