Erasure Codes Based Adaptive Multi-hop Reliable Data Transfer for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Development of efficient techniques for improving data transmission reliability is a major concern in the design of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs). In this paper, we propose an erasure code based multi-hop reliable data transfer scheme (ECRDT) for UWASNs. ECRDT is essentially a packet level forward error correction scheme based on either end-to-end erasure coding or hop-by-hop erasure coding. In the end-to-end approach, encoding and decoding are performed by the source node and sink node, respectively, while intermediate nodes just forward the data packets without any processing. The hop-by-hop erasure coding achieves per hop reliable data transfer along the multi-hop path. In this case, apart from the source node, all intermediate nodes perform encoding process and each node is required to adaptively compute the number of redundant packets for the next hop based on the quality of the corresponding hop. We present an analytical model to find the communication overhead, energy consumption and average delay of the multi-hop UWASN under the above erasure coding approaches. Simulation and analytical results show that the proposed ECRDT scheme based on hop-by-hop erasure coding can significantly reduce communication overhead, energy consumption and average delay.