energy efficient multi-path communication for time-critical applications in underwater sensor networks
Due to the long propagation delay and high error rate of acoustic channels, it is very challenging to provide reliable data transfer for time-critical applications in an energy-efficient way. On the one hand, traditional retransmission-upon-failure usually introduces very large end-to-end delay, thus is not proper for time-critical services. On the other hand, common approaches without retransmission consume lots of energy. In this paper, we propose a new multi-path power-control transmission (MPT) scheme, which can guarantee certain end-to-end packet error rate while achieving a good balance between the overall energy efficiency and the end-to-end packet delay. MPT smartly combines power control with multi-path routing and packet combining at the destination. With carefully designed power control strategies, MPT consumes much less energy than the conventional one-path transmission scheme without retransmission. Besides, since no hop-by-hop retransmission is allowed, MPT introduces much shorter delay than the traditional one-path scheme with retransmission. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of MPT. Our results show that MPT is highly energy efficient with low end-to-end packet delays.
energy efficiency underwater sensor networks delay critical service