Stochastically Optimized Fountain-Based Transmissions Over Underwater Acoustic Channels

The unique propagation features of underwater acoustic channels (UACs) and the harsh marine environment conditions lead to frequent packet losses in data transmissions. The lossy UAC needs a strong forward error correction (FEC) scheme to improve transmission reliability. To this end, we propose a stochastically optimized fountain-based transmission scheme to improve the transmission goodput over UACs. The fountain-based transmission is formulated as a stochastic optimization problem and solved using discrete stochastic approximation (DSA) approach, whose iterations are in accordance with the channel state estimation. We evaluate the performance of our proposal using the recently published UAC model. The simulation results show the iterative optimality in terms of goodput and statistic convergence of our proposal. The simulation result with node mobility also shows that our proposal can capture the dynamic changes of UACs.