An Energy Efficient Topology Management Scheme for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network Using Connected Dominating Sets

Underwater sensor networks can be applied to oceanographic data collection, offshore oil exploration or disaster warning. The energy resource of such networks is severely limited with no easy way to replenish the supply. One way to conserve energy is to manage the topology of the network such that redundant nodes can go to sleep. Considering an event driven application with delay-sensitive information, this paper investigates the utility of a connected dominating set (CDS)-based topology management scheme. The CDS-based scheme maintains a connected backbone of awake nodes to enable speedy data delivery. Nodes belonging to the CDS remain awake until the next computation of a new CDS. The relationship between the re-computation period of a CDS, ratio of CDS change and network lifetime is analyzed to determine an optimized re-computation period. The large propagation delay in underwater acoustics communications cripples the delivery of delay-sensitive data in an underwater network. The basics of a multiple-sink architecture is introduced and it is shown that such architecture exhibit potential in reducing average end-to-end delay.