Efficient Multipath Communication for Time-Critical Applications in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on networking Vol. 19; no. 1; pp. 28 - 41
• Main Authors: Zhou, Zhong, Peng, Zheng, Cui, Jun-Hong, Shi, Zhijie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2011; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Acoustic applications; Acoustic sensors; Applications; Channels; Consumption; Delay; Energy consumption; Energy efficiency; Energy transmission; Error analysis; Errors; Failure; network communications; Power control; Propagation delay; Studies; Telecommunication network reliability; Time factors; Underwater acoustics; Underwater communication; underwater sensor networks
• ISSN: 1063-6692; 1558-2566
• DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2010.2055886

Due to the long propagation delay and high error rate of acoustic channels, it is very challenging to provide reliable data transfer for time-critical applications in an energy-efficient way. On the one hand, traditional retransmission upon failure usually introduces very large end-to-end delay and is thus not proper for time-critical services. On the other hand, common approaches without retransmission consume lots of energy. In this paper, we propose a new multipath power-control transmission (MPT) scheme, which can guarantee certain end-to-end packet error rate while achieving a good balance between the overall energy efficiency and the end-to-end packet delay. MPT smartly combines power control with multipath routing and packet combining at the destination. With carefully designed power-control strategies, MPT consumes much less energy than the conventional one-path transmission scheme without retransmission. Besides, since no hop-by-hop retransmission is allowed, MPT introduces much shorter delays than the traditional one-path scheme with retransmission. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of MPT. Our results show that MPT is highly energy-efficient with low end-to-end packet delays.