Coverage-aware connectivity-constrained unattended sensor deployment in underwater acoustic sensor networks

Careful deployment of nodes in underwater acoustic sensor networks in a distributed manner with the goal of maximized coverage and guaranteed connectivity is a challenging problem because it is very difficult and costly to access the 3D underwater environment. This paper presents a novel algorithm for self-deployment of nodes in underwater acoustic sensor networks assuming that the nodes are randomly dropped to the water surface and form a densely populated connected network at the water surface. The idea of the algorithm is based on calculating an optimized depth for each node in the network in such a way that the possible sensing coverage overlaps are minimized and the connectivity of final topology is guaranteed. The algorithm has three main phases. In the first phase, nodes are organized in a tree structure that is rooted at the surface station. In the second phase, the depths for all nodes are computed iteratively at surface station. In the final phase, the calculated depths are distributed to nodes so that the nodes start sinking. The performance of the proposed approach is validated through simulation. We observed that the proposed approach performs at least 10% better in terms of network coverage than contemporary schemes in the literature. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.