Achieving high throughput and reliability in underwater acoustic networks for transmitting distributed and large volume of data is a challenging task due to the bandwidth-limited and unpredictable nature of the acoustic channel. In a multi-node network, such as in the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT), communication link efficiency varies dynamically: if the channel is not in good condition, e.g., when in deep fade, channel coding techniques may fail to deliver the information even with multiple retransmissions. Hence, an efficient and agile collaborative strategy is required to allocate appropriate resources to the communication links based on their status. The proposed solution adjusts the physical and link-layer parameters collaboratively for a Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)-based underwater network. An adaptive Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) solution is employed to guarantee reliable communications against errors in poor links. Results were validated using data collected from the LOON testbed-hosted at the NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia, Italy-and from the REP18-Atlantic sea trial conducted in Sept'18 in Portuguese water.
A type-I HARQ discards the erroneous received packet after a failed attempt to correct it, then the transmitter repeats the same packet until the error is corrected. This method might be inefficient in time-varying underwater acoustic channel. When the channel is in good condition, i.e., retransmission is not required, FEC information is more than it requires and so the throughput drops. On the other hand, if the channel is not in good condition, e.g., when in deep fade, the pre-defined FEC might not be adequate and the throughput drops again because of multiple retransmissions @cite_3 .
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2909223649 2327828810 80633931 2130286537
The severe nature of underwater channel poses a great challenge for prolonging underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) lifetime and achieving a reliable communication performance. Traditional approaches to improve the reliability such as automatic repeat request (ARQ) negatively affect the network lifetime (NL) due to energy dissipation caused by ARQ retransmission. A forward error correction (FEC) technique called fountain codes (FCs) can solve the energy efficiency problem of ARQ by transmitting both the original packet and some redundant packets to ensure a targeted reliability with few or no retransmissions. In this paper, we investigate performances of both traditional ARQ- and FC-based FEC methods in terms of NL, end-to-end delay, energy consumption, and frame error rate (FER) for UASNs. In this context, we abstract energy dissipation characteristics of conventional ARQ- and FC-based FEC method at the link-layer. We propose an integer linear programming (ILP) framework that maximizes the NL, which is operated on top of developed link-layer energy consumption models. Our results reveal that FC-based FEC methods can prolong the NL at a minimum of 16 while end-to-end delay, energy consumption, and FER can be reduced at least by 11 , 14 , and 9 as compared to classical ARQ, respectively. Achieving robust and reliable data communications in the harsh underwater environment is still a challenging issue due to the fast-changing and unpredictable nature of the acoustic channel. Notwithstanding the use of acknowledgement messages at the link layer, data transmission protocols still require more efficient error control strategies so to achieve a higher link reliability. A novel solution based on hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is proposed that exploits the diversity gain offered by independent links in an underwater acoustic Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system. Irrespective of the channel regime, the proposed scheme aims at reducing the probability of retransmission and at increasing the link reliability via packet-level codeword selection and waterfilling coding. Encoding and decoding algorithms at the transmitter and receiver, respectively, are designed, multiple evaluation metrics are defined, and computer-based simulation results are presented to quantify the performance improvement of the proposed methods. In mobile packet data and voice networks, a special coding scheme, known as the incremental redundancy hybrid ARQ (IR HARQ), achieves higher throughput efficiency than ordinary turbo codes by adapting its error correcting code redundancy to fluctuating channel conditions characteristic for this application. An IR HARQ protocol operates as follows. Initially, the information bits are encoded by a “mother” code and a selected number of parity bits are transmitted. If a retransmission is requested, only additional selected parity bits are transmitted. At the receiving end, the additional parity bits are combined with the previously received bits, allowing for an increase in the error correction capacity. This procedure is repeated after each subsequent retransmission request until the entire codeword of the mother code is transmitted. A number of important issues such as error rate performance after each transmission on time varying channels, and rate and power control are difficult to analyze in a network employing a particular HARQ scheme, i.e., a given mother code and given selection of bits for each transmission. By relaxing only the latter constraint, namely, by allowing random selection of the bits for each transmission, we provide very good estimates of error rates allowing us to address to a certain extent the rate and power control problem. Traditional approaches to reliably transmit information over an error-prone network employ either forward error correction (FEC) or retransmission techniques. In this paper, we propose some network coding schemes to reduce the number of broadcast transmissions from one sender to multiple receivers. The main idea is to allow the sender to combine and retransmit the lost packets in a certain way so that with one transmission, multiple receivers are able to recover their own lost packets. For comparison, we derive a few theoretical results on the bandwidth efficiency of the proposed network coding and traditional automatic repeat-request (ARQ) schemes. Both simulations and theoretical analysis confirm the advantages of the proposed network coding schemes over the ARQ ones.