Dynamic Node Cooperation in an Underwater Data Collection Network

In this paper, we consider a practical underwater data collection network, where one destination needs to collect data from multiple underwater nodes. With the conventional automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) protocol, the destination requests retransmission from each node individually without any node cooperation. We propose two protocols, selective relay cooperation and dynamic network coded cooperation, utilizing the fact that underwater nodes can overhear the transmission of the others. In the selective relay cooperation, one node can be selected as a relay to transmit the data from another undecoded node in the retransmission phase. In the network coded cooperation, the selected relay nodes transmit network coded packets to the destination. The relay nodes participating the cooperation are selected by the destination based on the channel quality, as measured by the effective signal-to-noise ratio. In addition to simulation results, we have carried out several lake tests based on a full protocol implementation. Simulation and field testing results demonstrate that the proposed schemes can gain significant performance improvement compared with the conventional ARQ scheme.