Due to the long preamble problem in underwater acoustic networks (UANs), traditional sender initiated handshaking MAC protocols are facing high overhead of control messages. To mitigate this problem, we advocate a receiver initiated handshaking method with parallel reservation to improve the handshaking efficiency. However, since the receiver is usually unaware of the status of senders, when to request data from the sender and how much data to request become two fundamental questions the

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... r initiated protocols have to answer. In this paper, we propose a traffic estimation based receiver initiated MAC (FERI MAC) with an adaptive data polling approach. The receivers in FERI MAC employ an on-line approximation of traffic distribution at the senders to predict the energy efficiency and channel utilization that can be achieved with the adaptive data polling. Only when the desired performance can be achieved will the receiver send out a data polling request. For the traffic estimation, we employ a resampling technique to keep a small computation and memory overhead. Via simulations, we evaluate the performance of FERI MAC, in terms of energy efficiency, channel utilization and one-hop delivery delay. FERI MAC shows a stable energy efficiency and channel utilization performance with arbitrary network traffic patterns. Our results also illustrate that, compared with existing receiver initiated MAC protocols, FERI MAC can achieve a higher energy efficiency while with some delay penalty. This confirms the strength of FERI MAC for delay tolerant applications.