Duplicate reduction with adaptive backoff for a flooding-based underwater network protocol

Abstract

We propose a protocol to reduce the number of duplicates in a flooding-based underwater acoustic communication network. The backoff time is adapted to the number of duplicates heard of each packet, in combination with a counter based scheme to refrain from forwarding if many duplicate transmissions are overheard. Simulations for a given scenario show that the number of duplicates transmitted in the network is indeed reduced, but that other the packet delivery ratio is somewhat compromised in the simulated scenario.