An improved data transport protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) are widely used in many application. However, the underwater acoustic channel poses many challenges for reliable data transmission protocol design. In this paper, we propose a new data transmission protocol based on Fountain codes and Selective-repeat ARQ scheme (FSR-ARQ). The new approach utilizes the packet error correction ability of rateless code and improves the re-transmission scheme with a sequence number from NACK packets to achieve better coding efficiency. Compared with traditional Stop-and-Wait ARQ, SDRT and FOCAR, our proposed protocol can achieve high reliability while maintaining high energy efficiency and short end-to-end delay.