A Hybrid Physical-Layer Network Coding Approach for Bidirectional Underwater Acoustic Networks

In this paper, we study bidirectional communications in multi-hop underwater acoustic networks, where two nodes exchange information with the help of a number of intermediate nodes. We propose an approach, called hybrid PNC, that employs two different PNC communication sessions hybridly to explore the benefits of the long propagation delay. Compared with the existing approaches, our approach can achieve nearly optimal bidirectional communication throughputs with a shorter latency, and allow flexible choices of design parameters.