Rigidity Driven Underwater Sensor Self-organized Deployment

Underwater sensor networks are underwater surveillance system whichconsists of sensors with acoustics and computing capacity, having self-organizingability. Due to the wide application in sea resources reconnaissance, pollutionmonitoring and military monitoring, etc., UWSNs have become a hot field inwireless sensor networks.In recent years, UWSNs related researches have involved in sensor placementand network organization, localization and tracking, routing protocols, etc. Amongthese, sensor deployment not only determines the monitoring quality of sensornetwork, but also acts as the foundation of network organization, routing protocolsand other applications, so the study of this problem is extremely significant.Compared with land wireless sensor placement, underwater sensor deployment isspecial in some characteristics: complicated and dynamic underwater environmentand sparsely scattered sensors with good mobility. Therefore, it is a key topic forsensors to adjust their positions according to the dynamic environment, so as toachieve good coverage and connectivity, and guarantee the optimal quality ofmonitoring.The main work and innovations of this paper are as follows:(1) We study sensor deployment problem in3D underwater environment.Rigid theory is introduced to define ‘rigidity-coverage value of sensor domain’ asthe evaluation for the positions of underwater sensors.(2) We propose a moving strategy of underwater sensors. A rigidity drivenmoving strategy which inspired by swarm intelligence, is developed to form acomplete sensor self-organization deployment mechanism. The moving strategyachieves the optimal positions of all sensors independently and periodically.(3) We experiment algorithm in static and dynamic environment. In dynamicunderwater environment, we introduce water flowing field to verify the actualeffectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The simulations demonstrate that theproposed underwater sensor deployment method can achieve excellent coverageand connectivity in distributed manner, and can be realized in distributed mannerwith fast convergence and good robustness.