AUV-Aided Communication Method For Underwater Mobile Sensor Networks

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) can supply good services for deep-sea engineering applications operating in the volatile underwater environment. UWSN,which is aided by multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), is getting growing interest because of good mobility and artificial intelligence of the AUV. Nevertheless, radio signals cannot properly propagate in water and there is a need for acoustic communication. It is full of challenges that acoustic communication has to bear some cost with longer delay,lower delivery rate, less bandwidth and higher bit error rate.In order to handle these challenges, this paper proposes an AUV-aided acoustic communication protocol, namely AA-RP (AUV-Aided Routing Protocol), which integrates the location algorithm and AUV's data collecting path planning into the routing protocol. It aims to make the network more efficient and economical. AA-RP relies on three phases:Hello Packet Broadcast, Agent Choosing and Data Forwarding, in which sensor nodes can build multiple dynamic data forwarding routes by forward routing packets, choose AUV agent, which collects data after AUV leaves, and choose an efficient route to forward data.During these processes, AA-RP takes full use of the flowing of routing packets to realize the location of some sensor nodes and to plan the data collecting path of AUV, which can improve the energy utilization.In order to test the performance of the proposed method, we use ns-3 simulator. The performance of proposed method is evaluated by comparing it with DBR and H2-DAB. The simulation results show that the method can reduce the network energy consumption and end-to-end delay with a good delivery ratio.