Joint Slot Scheduling and Power Allocation for Throughput Maximization of Clustered UASNs

In the last few decades, independent consideration of underwater acoustic medium access control (MAC) layer has received much attention for designing a reliable data transmission protocol. Although it can simplify the system design, it is often insufficient for the enhancement of overall system performance. The focus of this article is on the cross-layer optimization to maximize the network throughput (NT) of clustered underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) by jointly optimizing the sensor nodes’ slot scheduling and power allocation. The formulated problem is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, which is NP-hard. An alternating-optimization-based centralized algorithm is proposed first to solve it, which can achieve the best NT performance but at the price of high complexity. Therefore, a multileader multifollower Stackelberg game-based distributed algorithm is also proposed to achieve a better tradeoff between system performance and complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed schemes considering the information causality constraint have a better NT performance than those without a “systematic” consideration over such joint optimization, like the CMS-MAC algorithm.