The invention discloses a soft synchronization TDMA (
Time Division Multiple Access) protocol implementation method for an
underwater wireless sensor network, belongs to the technical field of
underwater wireless communication, and solves the problems of difficulty in synchronization and high conflict rate of the existing UWSNs in an
underwater sound environment with long
propagation delay. According to the method, the initial time of an active window is distributed to each
sensor node in the network at equal intervals, a periodic frame structure with the windows capable of being overlapped is established, and flexible adjustment of the frame length is achieved so as to optimize time
delay; window random
jitter is introduced to realize cross-period decoupling of the synchronization error, and the
cumulative effect of the synchronization error is relieved; an access moment is randomly selected in an active window according to truncation cosine-distribution, and data
packet transmission is performed at the access moment in the window, so that the conflict rate is remarkably reduced, the
throughput and the channel
utilization rate are improved, the end-to-end
delay is shortened, and the access fairness is improved on the premise that strict global synchronization is not needed; the method is suitable for resource-limited underwater sensor nodes and UWSNs scenes such as marine environment monitoring,
deep sea exploration and national defense communication.