3D- Deployment of Magnetic Induction Relays in Underwater Sensor Networks

Magnetic induction (MI) communication is a promising technology for underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) due to several benefits such as small transmission delay and multipath fading negligibility. However, the majority deployment strategies of the MI relays focus on 1D and 2D networks. In this paper, a optimal relay deployment algorithm is proposed to deploy the relay nodes in the 3D UWSN. To balance the number of sensor nodes in each clustering space, the K-means algorithm is used to divide the network space. In addition, the locations of the relay nodes are important for saving energy. To solve this issue, we adopt a gradient descent algorithm to find the optimal coordinates of the relay nodes. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed algorithm is a practical deployment strategy.