On Connectivity of Wireless Underwater Sensor Networks Using MI-assisted Acoustic Distributed Beamforming

In wireless underwater sensor networks (WUSNs), network connectivity is one of the most fundamental problems as it can directly impact the network lifetime and operation. Distributed beamforming can improve the connectivity by extending the communication range. However, the traditional acoustic communication results in the problem of too large synchronization error between nodes. Magnetic induction (MI) communication is a promising candidate thanks to several unique features such as small transmission delay, constant channel behavior and high bandwidth. WUSNs using MI-assisted acoustic distributed beamforming (MADB) can achieve better connectivity performance by enable the transmission range of nodes. In WUSNs-MADB, due to the underwater channel characteristics and the heterogeneous network architecture, the connectivity analysis is much more complicated than that of WUSNs. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model to analyze the connectivity of WUSNs-MADB. The simulation results show the accuracy of the mathematical model.