Optimal Relay Node Placement and Flow Allocation in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

In recent years, underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have attracted widespread attention in academia. Prolonging the network lifetime is a crucial issue for UASNs. Compared with traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs), stringent energy becomes more critical in UASNs because the battery equipped at sensor nodes has the limited amount of energy and it is much more difficult to replace or recharge in underwater circumstance. This fact motivates us to pursue the solutions to reduce power consumption by using relay nodes and flow allocation mechanism in order to extend the network lifetime. In this paper, the issues of relay node placement and the flow allocation have been considered as a joint problem and are formulated into an integer nonlinear programming problem, which is node placement-hard in general. To solve the problem efficiently, this paper proposes a novel heuristic scheme for UASNs, which works based on a 3-D architecture. The proposed scheme consists of three algorithms, named as Alternative Flow and Relay-node Adjustment as a whole. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme offers a simple yet attractive solution to the problem.