Network Coding for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Underwater acoustic sensor networks offer significant advantages for numerous maritime applications, allowing to connect and coordinate multiple seafloor sensors and autonomous underwater vehicles into a network for real-time data collection, monitoring, exploration and navigation. Underwater acoustic channels are characterized by high level of reverberations, big amount of multipath components, limited bandwidth and the half-duplex nature of underwater acoustic communication. These factors explain the underwater channel's essential difference from conventional terrestrial radio channels and complicate data transmissions in an underwater network. Underwater networking technologies are in great demand, so network protocols that ensure reliable underwater operations are of growing importance to the industry. The theory of network coding promises significant benefits to increase channel throughput and reduce data loss by transmitting encoded packets containing data from different source nodes. This paper bridges theory with practice by implementing the theory of network coding to increase the throughput of underwater acoustic networks. There are presented experimental results of network coding in shallow water with 5 nodes, including 2 end points and 3 access points.