MLOPS: A SIC-Based Minimum Frame Length With Optimized Power Scheduling for UANs

Due to the large propagation delay and scarce spectrum resource of the underwater wireless acoustic channels, it is essential to design efficient and reliable multiuser scheduling scheme for underwater network communication systems. The successive interference cancellation (SIC) technology that supports multiple parallel transmissions can improve spectrum efficiency, which is vital for the underwater acoustic networks (UANs). The SIC technology has been widely studied in the underwater network communication systems. However, there is no appropriate technology solving the link scheduling problem in the SIC-based UANs. In this paper, we propose a link-scheduling model for SIC-based UANs and formulate the problem of minimizing the transmission delay and overall network power consumption by combining transmitters scheduling and power allocating. We also present a polynomial-time algorithm named UMLOPS with the complexity of O(n) for unified traffic load, and for weighted traffic load, we present a universal algorithm named WMLOPS with the complexity of O(n 3 ), where n denotes the number of source nodes. The extensive simulation results reveal that both scheduling frame length and aggregate power consumption of MLOPS significantly outperform those of the existing time-division multiple access protocols in underwater sensor equipped aquatic swarm architecture networks.