On Reliable Data Transfer in Underwater Acoustic Networks: A Survey From Networking Perspective

Reliable data transfer aims to guarantee that the destination node can successfully receive what have been sent to it, and the basic mechanisms extensively for this purpose in radio frequency (RF) networks include redundancy and retransmission. However, this issue becomes much more challenging in underwater acoustic (UWA) networks in comparison with RF networks due to the following peculiar features of UWA channels: poor quality and high dynamics of UWA channels, much smaller channel capacity and much larger propagation delay, as well as asymmetric connectivity of UWA links. These features either limit extensive application of redundancy mechanisms or influence the performance of retransmission mechanisms. Therefore, many research results have been reported in the literature, with several different design strategies and various proposals available. This paper conducts a survey on many schemes proposed from the data link layer to the transport layer, and discusses challenging issues necessary for further research.