Underwater acoustic sensor networks exhibit characteristics such as high propagation delay and low data rates, which are different from those of terrestrial wireless networks. Therefore, the conventional protocols used in wireless networks can be restrictive and inefficient when applied to underwater acoustic sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a medium access control protocol (MAC) to enhance the energy efficiency and throughput in underwater acoustic sensor networks. The proposed protocol employs a slot-based competition mechanism that reserves a time slot to send a data packet in advance. In the proposed protocol, collision between nodes can occur due to competition to obtain a slot. However, the proposed protocol minimizes the collisions between nodes because the nodes store the reservation information of the neighboring nodes, this reduces unnecessary energy consumption and increases throughput. We perform a simulation to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol with regard to the energy consumption, the number of collision, channel utilization, throughput and transmission delay. We compare the proposed protocol with the conventional protocol, and the performance results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the conventional protocol.