Design and Implementation of A Transport Protocol with Network Coding for Delay Tolerant Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

In recent years, Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have become a popular research topic that has broad application prospects in many civilian and military fields such as ocean observation, disaster forecasting and submarine detection. Since underwater acoustic channels have the characteristics of high and dynamic time delay and large propagation loss, UASNs can be viewed as delay/disruption tolerant networks (DTNs). However, most of the research on DTNs for UASNs focus on protocols design in physical, MAC and network layers. Due to the high packet loss ratio, existing transportation layer protocols cannot be directly applied in real UASNs. In this paper, we design and implement a transport layer protocol which is suitable for underwater acoustic sensor networks. Based on the storage-carry-forwarding concept of the DTNs, this protocol can improve the reliability of data transmission through retransmission and confirmation mechanisms. Furthermore, network coding scheme is applied to reduced data conflicts in the proposed transmission scheme.