Multi-Agent-Based Acoustic Sensor Node Deployment in Underwater Acoustic Wireless Sensor Networks

The deployment of acoustic sensor nodes in 3-D underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks (UAWSN) is a difficult task due to various aquatic conditions and physical obstacles. This work proposes multi-agent-based acoustic sensor node deployment (MASD) to deploy the acoustic nodes at ideal positions to enhance coverage and seamless connectivity. The proposed scheme works is threefold: 1) AUV initiates random walk in the network to gather the information and prospective common reference points; 2) the base station gets this information through surface buoys and computes the routing path, feasible locations for deploying new nodes; and 3) AUV collects this information and follows the path to deploy nodes with the help of agents. The multi-agent-enabled deployment framework (MADF) is proposed to support the deployment process at each level of the proposed MASD scheme. The performance of propagation loss, coverage, and overhead tradeoffs are analyzed to validate the proposed scheme. Mobility issues can be further re-investigated in shallow water as a future direction to the MASD scheme.