An FEC-based Reliable Data Transport Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks

—In this paper, we investigate the reliable data transport problem in underwater sensor networks. Underwater sensor networks are significantly different from terrestrial sensor networks in two aspects: acoustic channels are used for communication and most sensor nodes are mobile due to water current. These distinctions feature underwater sensor networks with low bandwidth capacity, large propagation delay, high error probability, half-duplex channels, and highly dynamic topology, which pose many new challenges for reliable data transport in underwater sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a protocol, called segmented data reliable transport (SDRT), to achieve reliable data transfer in underwater sensor networks. SDRT is essentially a hybrid approach of ARQ and FEC. It adopts efficient erasure codes (so-called SVT codes in this paper), transferring encoded packets block by block and hop by hop. Compared with other existing reliable data transport approaches for underwater netwo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICCCN
• Authors: Peng Xie, Jun-Hong Cui
• Keywords: ICCCN 2007, Reliable Data Transport, SDRT, Underwater Sensor Networks