Asymmetric multi-path division communications in underwater acoustic networks with fading channels

Ensuring the required reliability and energy efficiency is an essential issue in Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs). Many schemes have been developed to improve reliability and energy efficiency in such networks. However, most of the existing schemes are based on the assumption that the noise is uniformly distributed in the underwater surrounding and the noise attenuation is not considered. This paper takes the noise attenuation into account and proposes a new Asymmetric Multi-path Division Communications (AMDC) mechanism to improve reliability and energy efficiency in UANs. To this end, an Asymmetric Multiple Layer Division (AMLD) scheme is developed to divide the underwater communication space for the purpose of constructing the tree-based multi-paths. The problem of energy efficiency of AMDC is then formulated as a distributed optimization problem and is solved in order to achieve a set of feasible solutions. Finally, simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed AMDC. The results reveal that AMDC outperforms the existing multi-path transmission scheme in UANs in terms of energy efficiency and the total Packet Error Rate (PER).

► An Asymmetric Multiple Layer Division (AMLD) scheme is proposed.
► The problem of AMDC is formulated as a distributed optimization problem.
► The optimization problem is solved to calculate the optimal transmission power.
► Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance.