Improvement of Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks Performance with Fountain Codes

Abstract

Prolonging the lifetime and providing a reliable communication performance of underwater acoustic sensor network (UASN) nodes are challenging issues due to the severe nature of the underwater acoustic channel. Traditional methods that ensure the reliability of communications by using retransmissions such as automatic repeat request (ARQ) negatively affect the lifetime of UASNs since they are not energy efficient. Fountain codes (FC), which is a forward error correction technique, aim to solve the energy efficiency problem of ARQ method by transmitting the original data frame and some redundant frames together in the network without using retransmissions. The number of redundant frames to be transmitted is dynamically adjusted to achieve a predetermined reliability criterion at the receiver node. In this study, an integer linear programming (ILP) method is proposed which maximizes the lifetime of UASNs by using FCs. Our results show that FC method provides better performance metrics (e.g., network lifetime, end-to-end delay, and energy consumption) than the traditional ARQ method.