Mobile Data Gathering With Hop-Constrained Clustering in Underwater Sensor Networks

Recent years have witnessed growing attention to the mobile data gathering schemes using autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs). In this paper, a novel cluster-based mobile data gathering (CMDG) scheme for large-scale UWSNs is presented to make a tradeoff between the data gathering latency and energy saving. To cluster the acoustic sensors and cover their heads with the shortest possible tour, we first formulate it into an optimization problem and then propose two efficient algorithms to obtain the near-optimal solutions in the less computational time. We also discuss the impact of topology change on the CMDG performance. To the best of our knowledge, CMDG is the first AUV tour planning scheme which is able to deal with the sensors mobility in UWSNs. CMDG is scalable and also applicable in both connected and disconnected networks. In terms of energy-latency tradeoff, CMDG can effectively keep the tour length short while prolonging the network lifetime compared to those of the existing mobile data gathering schemes. The effectiveness of CMDG is validated through an extensive simulation study which reveals the performance improvement in the energy saving, data gathering latency, and packet delivery ratio.