A Study on Sensing Efficient Sensor Movement Algorithm for the Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing interest in monitoring the marine environment for scientific exploration, commercial exploitation and coastline protection. One of ideal methods for this type of extensive monitoring is a networked underwater wireless sensor distributed system, referred to as an Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs). The UWSNs consist of a variable number of sensors and vehicles that are deployed to perform collaborative monitoring tasks over a given area. Underwater sensor nodes (Sensors or Vehicles) will find applications in oceanographic data collection, pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster prevention, assisted navigation and tactical surveillance applications. Moreover, unmanned or autonomous underwater vehicles, equipped with sensors, will enable the exploration of natural undersea resources and gathering of scientific data in collaborative monitoring missions. Underwater acoustic networking is the enabling technology for these applications. Many researchers are currently engaged in developing networking solutions for terrestrial wireless and sensor networks and ad hoc networks. Since UWSNs have more challenge than terrestrial WSNs, adopting sensing coverage and communication capacity schemes is very important. However, due to the different nature of the underwater environment and applications, there are several drawbacks with respect to the suitability of the existing solutions for terrestrial WSNs. Moreover because UWSNs are respectively sparse than terrestrial WSNs and have a short sensing range, sensor movement scheme is also important as much sensing coverage and communication capacity schemes. In this thesis, we investigate how the sensor’s communication capacity is influenced by the sensing coverage and review the state of precious routing and data aggregation researches in terrestrial WSNs in order to apply those to UWSNs. Then, we adopt a Queen and Knapsack problem approach to deploy the underwater sensor nodes, calculate sensor dispersion and sensing efficiency factor for UWSNs and suggest an enhanced sensor movement algorithm that considers the dispersion balancing once the sensing is occurred. We simulate the proposed enhanced sensor movement algorithm in the environment of UWSNs. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better efficiency than the existing sensor deployment algorithm.