BATS Coding for Underwater Acoustic Communication Networks

Communication networks formed by Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have recently been employed for a variety of applications in oceanographic exploration and environmental protection, and military uses. The promise of such networks is very high, but their performance is limited by the low reliability of communications over the underwater acoustic channel. In order to increase the end-to-end throughput in multi-hop network configurations, chains of relay nodes can be employed. Unfortunately, the usual techniques utilized to address channel errors and packet erasures in multi-hop terrestrial networks such as Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding are ineffective in the underwater channel due to adverse multipath propagation and long delays. Solutions based on network coding have, therefore, been investigated in the literature. We propose and evaluate utilization of Batched Sparse (BATS) coding, which is a combination of fountain coding and network coding, in order to improve the resilience of multi hop underwater acoustic communication networks (UWACNets) consisting of multiple underwater transceiver nodes. BATS coding allows to overcome the limitations of channel coding in terms of robustness and those of network coding in terms of computational complexity, while noticeably improving throughput performance.