FRT: Fast and reliable transport protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) are prone to message loss due to their poor link condition with high bit error rate (BER). Retransmission-based mechanisms such as ARQ can be used for the reliability, however, they are not suitable for UWSNs due to the inherent long propagation delay of UWSNs. Therefore, a forward error correction (FEC) mechanism might be an alternative in order to guarantee the reliable message delivery. In this paper, we therefore propose a fast and reliable transport (called FRT) protocol for UWSNs. The FRT protocol takes advantage of the FEC mechanism and utilizes link quality toward neighbors so as to provide reliable and fast delivery of packets. Using ns-2 simulator, we verify that our FRT protocol achieves less latency than an existing protocol without an increase of transmission overhead.