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Underwater wireless communication systems can be useful for underwater environment observation, catastrophe prevention, ocean resources exploration, ocean organism research, vessel sinking exploration, and so on. However, unlike terrestrial wireless communication, underwater wireless communication should consider factors such as long propagation delay, limited transmission capacity, high bit-error rate due to potential loss in power, ambient noise, man-made noise, multi-path, etc., because of the inherent characteristics of water. Thus, in this paper, we propose a suitable media access control (MAC) protocol that applies a combination of the ALOHA MAC protocol and the handshaking MAC protocol to underwater environment. We further propose a mathematical analysis model that considers end-to-end delay and throughput to evaluate performance. We also verify performance improvement in the proposed scheme in comparison with existing MAC protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]