Tic-Tac-Toe-Arch: a self-organising virtual architecture for Underwater Sensor Networks

In this study, the authors propose Tic-Tac-Toe-Arch, an `energy-efficient´, `self-organising´, and `virtual´ network architecture for Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs). In UWSNs, underwater currents play a major role for connectivity disruption. The Tic-Tac-Toe-Arch is capable of self-organising the selection of active nodes to maintain the connectivity providing a `virtual topology´. Further, this selection is such that the redundant nodes are selected based on node density and passive node mobility in the corresponding underwater layer. Thus, the network energy consumption is less because of different, but low activity ratio, through the layers. Prior works on UWSN architecture, such as Multipath Virtual Sink, 3D Architecture, and EDETA, did not consider the change in topology because of passive node mobility. Moreover, they did not consider the duty-cycle control through topology management, which, in turn consumes high energy. The authors evaluated the performance of Tic-Tac-Toe-Arch through simulations in NS-3. In terms of the topology formation time, the simulation results show that 99.3% performance improvement is achieved in Tic-Tac-Toe-Arch than EDETA.