Topology-Transparent Hybrid CS-TDMA Protocol With Dynamic Neighbor Clustering for Deep-Sea Underwater Acoustic Networks

Underwater acoustic networks (UANs) in deep-sea suffer from long propagation delays and severe multipath interference under limited bandwidth. This paper presents DNC-CS-TDMA MAC protocol, a topology-transparent hybrid MAC that overlays delay-aware, locally ordered carrier sensing on a TDMA backbone. Each owner slot admits a dynamic neighbor cluster for safe intra-slot reuse via an adaptive CS-Window and reverberation-aware guarding. Without global link-state knowledge, DNC-CS-TDMA selects the active cluster by maximizing an estimated throughput increment that accounts for contention gain and next-slot penalty. Simulations over large-scale, deep-sea topologies show consistent gains in throughput and end-to-end delay over TT-TDMA and DOTS under medium-to-high traffic loads.