Reliable Braided Multipath Routing with Network Coding for Underwater Sensor Networks

Owing to the long propagation delay and high error rate of acoustic channels, it is very challenging to provide reliable data transfer for underwater sensor networks. Moreover, network coding is proved to be an effective coding technique for throughput and robustness of networks. In this paper, we propose a Reliable Braided Multipath Routing with Network Coding for underwater sensor networks （RBMR-NC）. Disjoint multi-path algorithm is used to build independent actual paths, as called main paths. Some braided paths on each main path are built according to the braided multi-path algorithm, which are called logic paths. When a data packet is transmitted by these nodes, the nodes can employ network coding to encode packets coming from the same group in order to further reduce relativity among these packets, and enhance the probability of successful decoding at the sink node. Braided multi-path can make the main paths to be multiplexed to reduce the probability of long paths. This paper mainly employs successful delivery rate to evaluate RBMR-NC model with theoretical analysis and simulation methods. The results indicate that the proposed RBMR-NC protocol is valuable to enhance network reliability and to reduce system redundancy.