Weak reliability and low energy efficiency are the inherent problems in Underwater Sensor Networks (USNs) characterized by the acoustic channels. Although multiple-path communications coupled by Forward Error Correction (FEC) can achieve high performance for USNs, the low probability of successful recovery of received packets in the destination node significantly affects the overall Packet Error Rate (PER) and the number of multiple paths required, which in turn becomes a critical factor for reliability and energy consumption. In this paper, a novel Multiple-path FEC approach (M-FEC) based on Hamming Coding is proposed for improving reliability and energy efficiency in USNs. A Markovian model is developed to formulate the probability of M-FEC and calculate the overall PER for the proposed decision and feedback scheme, which can reduce the number of the multiple paths and achieve the desirable overall PER in M-FEC. Compared to the existing multipath communication scheme, extensive simulation experiments show that the proposed approach achieves significantly lower packet delay while consuming only 20-30 percent of energy in multiple-path USNs with various Bit Error Rates (BER).
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