AUV-Based Efficient Data Collection Scheme for Underwater Linear Sensor Networks

Abstract

The research on underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) has grown considerably in recent years where the main focus remains to develop a reliable communication protocol to overcome its challenges between various underwater sensing devices. The main purpose of UWSNs is to provide a low cost and an unmanned data collection system for a range of applications such as offshore exploration, pollution monitoring, oil and gas pipeline monitoring, surveillance, etc. One of the common types of UWSNs is linear sensor network (LSN), which speciall targets monitoring the underwater oil and gas pipelines. Under this application, in most of the previously proposed works, networks are deployed without considering the heterogeneity and capacity of the various sensor nodes. This negligence leads to the problem of inefficient data delivery from the sensor nodes deployed on the pipeline to the surface sinks. In addition, the existing path planning algorithms do not consider the network coverage of heterogeneous sensor nodes.