Deployment strategies for underwater sensing and processing networks

Abstract

One method of alleviating the burdens of low bandwidth channel in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) is to perform in-network processing on the collected data, which leads to efficient channel usage, improvement of the end-to-end delay, and improvement of the network lifetime. However, for applications that require large amounts of data, such as seismic monitoring, the detection and tracking of marine objects, and underwater multimedia systems, the use of traditional underwater sensor nodes to perform such data processing techniques is impractical because of their limited power and processing capability. Therefore, the deployment of underwater sensor nodes called processing nodes that have extended power resources and higher features processing units can mitigate the problem of underwater in-network processing. Because the underwater processing nodes are expensive, their deployment is usually considered to be an optimization problem with the objective to best satisfy certain parameters. To solve the optimization problem efficiently, we propose several heuristic approaches that can be used to solve the optimization problem in polynomial time. The quality of the obtained solutions is verified by simulation and compared with the optimal solution.