Optimal Redundancy Control Strategy for Fountain Code-Based Underwater Acoustic Communication

In this paper, a transmission redundancy optimization strategy for fountain codes that uses an adaptive filtering technique as well as recent results concerning the upper bound of the source packet erasure probability for fountain codes over finite fields is proposed. The performance of the proposed strategy was evaluated in static and simulated realistic underwater acoustic channel environments simulated by a recently proposed statistical underwater acoustic channel model. The goal of this investigation is to improve the communication efficiency of underwater acoustic sensor networks that use communication protocols based on fountain codes. The performance of the proposed strategy is compared with the recently proposed approaches of discrete stochastic approximation (DSA) and the joint power and rate control (JPR) schemes. The simulation results demonstrate that the strategy proposed in this paper performs better than the existing schemes in both static and simulated realistic environments. The proposed strategy is 4.75 times better than the DSA in the static convergence performance evaluation. Further analysis shows that in the presence of a simulated realistic environment, compared to DSA and JPR, the strategy proposed in this paper reduces the overall transmission redundancy by approximately 11.4% and 52.6%, respectively. It also improves the average communication efficiency by 1.3% and 12.5%, respectively. The average optimization error relative to optimal redundancy is improved by approximately 62.1% and 92.5%, respectively. These numerical results are obtained by employing the specific simulation parameters and the simulated environment mentioned in this paper.