Location-based k-ACK aggregation method for underwater sensor networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) suffers from high bit error rate, low bandwidth, long and variable propagation delay, etc. In these networks, providing reliability of packet transmissions is an important issue. However, with typical end-to-end acknowledgement methods, the networks experience an ACK explosion problem which leads to wasting the network bandwidth significantly. In this paper, we propose a novel location-based k ACK aggregation method (called LAA) for underwater sensor networks. LAA aggregates k ACK packets into one aggregated-ACK packet and transmits it to source nodes. Using ns-2 simulator, we verify that LAA achieves better throughput and lower number of ACK transmissions.