Multipath Routing with Erasure Coding in Underwater Delay Tolerant Sensor Networks

Reliable data delivery is a major challenge for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) due to the harsh acoustic communication environment. In order to address this challenge, we propose a new erasure coding based multipath routing (ECMR) scheme to reduce the packet loss ratio in UWSNs. Specifically, a multipath routing algorithm with the modified link weight is designed to adapt the delay tolerant link state routing (DTLSR) algorithm to the underwater acoustic channel environment. As a reliable transmission process, each packet is split into several blocks, and erasure coding is employed to generate redundant blocks. Based on the Bayes' theorem, we propose a new mechanism to distribute different numbers of coded blocks to multiple paths with specific reliability, in order to optimize the transmission success rate. Simulation results show that the ECMR scheme can effectively reduce the packet loss ratio during data delivery in UWSNs.