Multi-path Division Transmission for Improving Reliability and Energy Effciency in Underwater Acoustic Networks

Reliability and energy efficiency are the crucial issues for construction of Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs). Many schemes have been developed to improve reliability and energy efficiency in UANs. However, most of the existing schemes are based on the unrealistic assumptions that the noise in the underwater surrounding is uniformly distributed and the attenuation of noise is not considered. In this paper, we take the noise attenuation into account and propose a new Multi-path Division Transmission (MDT) mechanism to improve reliability and energy efficiency in UANs. To this end, a Multiple Layer Division (MLD) scheme is developed to divide the underwater communication space for the purpose of initializing the tree-based multi-paths. The problem of energy efficiency of MDT is then formulated as a distributed optimization problem and is solved so as to achieve a set of feasible solutions. Finally, extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed MDT. The results reveal that MDT significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art multi-path transmission schemes in UANs in terms of energy efficiency and total Packet Error Rate(PER).