Intelligent deployment strategies for passive underwater sensor networks

Passive underwater sensor networks are often used to monitor a general area of the ocean, a port or military installation, or to detect underwater vehicles near a high value unit at sea, such as a fuel ship or aircraft carrier. Deploying an underwater sensor network across a large area of interest (AOI), for military surveillance purposes, is a significant challenge due to the inherent difficulties posed by the underwater channel in terms of sensing and communications between sensors. Moreover, monetary constraints, arising from the high cost of these sensors and their deployment, limit the number of available sensors. As a result, sensor deployment must be done as efficiently as possible. The objective of this work is to develop a deployment strategy for passive underwater sensors in an area clearance scenario, where there is no apparent target for an adversary to gravitate towards, such as a ship or a port, while considering all factors pertinent to underwater sensor deployment. These factors include sensing range, communications range, monetary costs, link redundancy, range dependence, and probabilistic visitation. A complete treatment of the underwater sensor deployment problem is presented in this work from determining the purpose of the sensor field to physically deploying the sensors. Assuming a field designer is given a suboptimal number of sensors, they must be methodically allocated across an AOI. The Game Theory Field Design (GTFD) model, proposed in this work, is able to accomplish this task by evaluating the acoustic characteristics across the AOI and allocating sensors accordingly. Since GTFD considers only circular sensing coverage regions, an extension is proposed to consider irregularly shaped regions. Sensor deployment locations are planned using a proposed evolutionary approach, called the Underwater Sensor Deployment Evolutionary Algorithm, which utilizes two suitable network topologies, mesh and cluster. The effects of these topologies, and a sensor\u27s communications range, on the sensing capabilities of a sensor field, are also investigated. Lastly, the impact of deployment imprecision on the connectivity of an underwater sensor field, using a mesh topology, is analyzed, for cases where sensor locations after deployment do not exactly coincide with planned sensor locations

Deployment, Coverage And Network Optimization In Wireless Video Sensor Networks For 3D Indoor Monitoring

As a result of extensive research over the past decade or so, wireless sensor networks (wsns) have evolved into a well established technology for industry, environmental and medical applications. However, traditional wsns employ such sensors as thermal or photo light resistors that are often modeled with simple omni-directional sensing ranges, which focus only on scalar data within the sensing environment. In contrast, the sensing range of a wireless video sensor is directional and capable of providing more detailed video information about the sensing field. Additionally, with the introduction of modern features in non-fixed focus cameras such as the pan, tilt and zoom (ptz), the sensing range of a video sensor can be further regarded as a fan-shape in 2d and pyramid-shape in 3d. Such uniqueness attributed to wireless video sensors and the challenges associated with deployment restrictions of indoor monitoring make the traditional sensor coverage, deployment and networked solutions in 2d sensing model environments for wsns ineffective and inapplicable in solving the wireless video sensor network (wvsn) issues for 3d indoor space, thus calling for novel solutions. In this dissertation, we propose optimization techniques and develop solutions that will address the coverage, deployment and network issues associated within wireless video sensor networks for a 3d indoor environment. We first model the general problem in a continuous 3d space to minimize the total number of required video sensors to monitor a given 3d indoor region. We then convert it into a discrete version problem by incorporating 3d grids, which can achieve arbitrary approximation precision by adjusting the grid granularity. Due in part to the uniqueness of the visual sensor directional sensing range, we propose to exploit the directional feature to determine the optimal angular-coverage of each deployed visual sensor. Thus, we propose to deploy the visual sensors from divergent directional angles and further extend k-coverage to ``k-angular-coverage\u27\u27, while ensuring connectivity within the network. We then propose a series of mechanisms to handle obstacles in the 3d environment. We develop efficient greedy heuristic solutions that integrate all these aforementioned considerations one by one and can yield high quality results. Based on this, we also propose enhanced depth first search (dfs) algorithms that can not only further improve the solution quality, but also return optimal results if given enough time. Our extensive simulations demonstrate the superiority of both our greedy heuristic and enhanced dfs solutions. Finally, this dissertation discusses some future research directions such as in-network traffic routing and scheduling issues

Internet of Underwater Things and Big Marine Data Analytics -- A Comprehensive Survey

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is an emerging communication ecosystem developed for connecting underwater objects in maritime and underwater environments. The IoUT technology is intricately linked with intelligent boats and ships, smart shores and oceans, automatic marine transportations, positioning and navigation, underwater exploration, disaster prediction and prevention, as well as with intelligent monitoring and security. The IoUT has an influence at various scales ranging from a small scientific observatory, to a midsized harbor, and to covering global oceanic trade. The network architecture of IoUT is intrinsically heterogeneous and should be sufficiently resilient to operate in harsh environments. This creates major challenges in terms of underwater communications, whilst relying on limited energy resources. Additionally, the volume, velocity, and variety of data produced by sensors, hydrophones, and cameras in IoUT is enormous, giving rise to the concept of Big Marine Data (BMD), which has its own processing challenges. Hence, conventional data processing techniques will falter, and bespoke Machine Learning (ML) solutions have to be employed for automatically learning the specific BMD behavior and features facilitating knowledge extraction and decision support. The motivation of this paper is to comprehensively survey the IoUT, BMD, and their synthesis. It also aims for exploring the nexus of BMD with ML. We set out from underwater data collection and then discuss the family of IoUT data communication techniques with an emphasis on the state-of-the-art research challenges. We then review the suite of ML solutions suitable for BMD handling and analytics. We treat the subject deductively from an educational perspective, critically appraising the material surveyed.Comment: 54 pages, 11 figures, 19 tables, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, peer-reviewed academic journa

Deep learning for internet of underwater things and ocean data analytics

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is an emerging technological ecosystem developed for connecting objects in maritime and underwater environments. IoUT technologies are empowered by an extreme number of deployed sensors and actuators. In this thesis, multiple IoUT sensory data are augmented with machine intelligence for forecasting purposes

Distributed navigation of multi-robot systems for sensing coverage

A team of coordinating mobile robots equipped with operation specific sensors can perform different coverage tasks. If the required number of robots in the team is very large then a centralized control system becomes a complex strategy. There are also some areas where centralized communication turns into an issue. So, a team of mobile robots for coverage tasks should have the ability of decentralized or distributed decision making. This thesis investigates decentralized control of mobile robots specifically for coverage problems. A decentralized control strategy is ideally based on local information and it can offer flexibility in case there is an increment or decrement in the number of mobile robots. We perform a broad survey of the existing literature for coverage control problems. There are different approaches associated with decentralized control strategy for coverage control problems. We perform a comparative review of these approaches and use the approach based on simple local coordination rules. These locally computed nearest neighbour rules are used to develop decentralized control algorithms for coverage control problems. We investigate this extensively used nearest neighbour rule-based approach for developing coverage control algorithms. In this approach, a mobile robot gives an equal importance to every neighbour robot coming under its communication range. We develop our control approach by making some of the mobile robots playing a more influential role than other members of the team. We develop the control algorithm based on nearest neighbour rules with weighted average functions. The approach based on this control strategy becomes efficient in terms of achieving a consensus on control inputs, say heading angle, velocity, etc. The decentralized control of mobile robots can also exhibit a cyclic behaviour under some physical constraints like a quantized orientation of the mobile robot. We further investigate the cyclic behaviour appearing due to the quantized control of mobile robots under some conditions. Our nearest neighbour rule-based approach offers a biased strategy in case of cyclic behaviour appearing in the team of mobile robots. We consider a clustering technique inside the team of mobile robots. Our decentralized control strategy calculates the similarity measure among the neighbours of a mobile robot. The team of mobile robots with the similarity measure based approach becomes efficient in achieving a fast consensus like on heading angle or velocity. We perform a rigorous mathematical analysis of our developed approach. We also develop a condition based on relaxed criteria for achieving consensus on velocity or heading angle of the mobile robots. Our validation approach is based on mathematical arguments and extensive computer simulations

From MANET to people-centric networking: Milestones and open research challenges

In this paper, we discuss the state of the art of (mobile) multi-hop ad hoc networking with the aim to present the current status of the research activities and identify the consolidated research areas, with limited research opportunities, and the hot and emerging research areas for which further research is required. We start by briefly discussing the MANET paradigm, and why the research on MANET protocols is now a cold research topic. Then we analyze the active research areas. Specifically, after discussing the wireless-network technologies, we analyze four successful ad hoc networking paradigms, mesh networks, opportunistic networks, vehicular networks, and sensor networks that emerged from the MANET world. We also present an emerging research direction in the multi-hop ad hoc networking field: people centric networking, triggered by the increasing penetration of the smartphones in everyday life, which is generating a people-centric revolution in computing and communications