Cluster based data aggregation in underwater acoustic sensor networks

The underwater acoustic channel has unique features such as low bandwidth, high propagation delay, high channel error rates, multipath fading and so on and also sensor nodes are constrained of the resources such as limited power, limited memory space and processing speed. In this paper, we are concerned with efficient utilization of these resources by applying data aggregation technique on the sensor data. We propose a data aggregation technique for the underwater acoustic sensor networks(UW-ASNs) involving 3 steps: (i) Formation of clusters (ii) Election of cluster heads (CH) (iii) Transferring of data to the sink node without aggregation and by applying the aggregation technique (averaging technique). A comparative study of with aggregation and without aggregation is carried out. By the simulation results we show that UW-ASNs environment incorporated with the data aggregation technique performs better than without aggregation in terms of energy consumed and network lifetime.