Data Collection with Multiple Mobile Actors in Underwater Sensor Networks

Underwater sensor networks (USNs) could provide real time in-situ monitoring to supply high spatio-temporal resolution capability. However underwater environment represents many challenges for sensor networks. It has become an urgent problem to get high temporal precision sampling data from USNs and to prolong USNspsila lifetime at the same time. In this paper, we present an underwater application model for collecting detail data from USNs with multiple mobile actors to get high temporal resolution capability. Our proposed complete strategy works in two ways: local base station collects sensorspsila data with regular time resolution, and mobile actors collect data from virtual clusters with high temporal resolution. We present three algorithms to accomplish the network model: a) area partitioning and actors scattering algorithm, b) sub-region optimizing algorithm, and c) virtual cluster formation algorithm. The paper present simulations to evaluate our proposed algorithms. The results indicates that our strategy can achieve lower end-to-end delay which is one eighth of that by former methods, actors can collect high temporal resolution data through virtual clusters, local network alternates within two network states (local USN and virtual clusters) freely. At the same time, since the proposed approach does not reduce local USNspsila lifetime, it has great potential in underwater network applications.