Full Duplex Underwater Acoustic Networking

We investigate the benefits of in-band full duplex (FD) communication for underwater acoustic network (UAN) protocol development. In the case of a point-to-point link, FD communication allows simultaneous transmission in both directions, thus doubling the maximum throughput. However, in UANs the interference from other nodes must be managed using a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. In this study, we evaluate the throughput gains afforded by FD communication for ALOHA random access and schedule-based MAC protocols, in particular, proposing a spatial reuse scheduling algorithm that exploits FD communication. Further work includes the development and hardware implementation of UAN protocols that exploit the two-element FD transducer developed at York.