Energy Optimisation Through Path Selection for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper explores energy-efficient ways of retrieving data from underwater sensor fields using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Since AUVs are battery-powered and therefore energy-constrained, their energy consumption is a critical consideration in designing underwater wireless sensor networks. The energy consumed by an AUV depends on the hydrodynamic design, speed, on-board payload and its trajectory. In this paper, we optimise the trajectory taken by the AUV deployed from a floating ship to collect data from every cluster head in an underwater sensor network and return to the ship to offload the data. The trajectory optimisation algorithm models the trajectory selection as a stochastic shortest path problem and uses reinforcement learning to select the minimum cost path, taking into account that banked turns consume more energy than straight movement. We also investigate the impact of AUV speed on its energy consumption. The results show that our algorithm improves AUV energy consumption by up to 50% compared with the Nearest Neighbour algorithm for sparse deployments

Self-Organized Ad Hoc Mobile (SOAM) Underwater Sensor Networks.

Política de acceso abierto tomada de: https://beta.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/3570The need of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) having mobile sensor nodes has been there for a long time in form of underwater warfare or explorations by autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) or remote unmanned vehicles (ROVs). There are very few protocols for ad hoc mobile UWSNs (AMUWSNs). Designing a protocol for AMUWSN is quite challenging because of continuous random movement of the sensor nodes. In addition to random movement, the challenges to design a routing protocol for AMUWSN are more demanding than terrestrial ad hoc networks due to acoustic communications, which has large propagation delay in water. In this article, we present a self-organized ad hoc mobile (SOAM) routing protocol for AMUWSN. The sensor nodes may need to communicate with each other to the gateway (GW). The protocol, which we also refer to as SOAM, is a reactive, self-configuring, and self-organizing cluster-based routing protocol that uses received signal strength (RSS) for distance estimation. A beacon (BCN) packet will be sent by the GW, which will traverse through all the cluster heads (CHs) to form forwarding paths between the GW and the CHs. The ordinary sensor nodes (OSNs) will select the CHs every time they intend to forward a packet based on the BCN and they will receive from CHs. The formation of the forwarding path between the GW and the CHs and the selection CHs by OSN is explained in Section IV