Mobile Data Collection Paths for Node Cooperative Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Given a middle-scale underwater acoustic network, to collect data from the multiple underwater nodes, the surface destination node need to be working on mobile data collection mechanism. In this paper, compared to traditional automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) protocol, we proposed node cooperation (NC) to increase the data collection efficiency for the surface node, utilizing the fact that underwater nodes can overhear the transmission of the others. However, different data collection paths can lead to different data collection efficiency for the middle-scale network when employing NC protocol. For one specific node cooperative underwater acoustic network, the underwater nodes are distributed at random within a circle planar region. As the restriction of underwater transmission power, the planar region is divided into several sub-zones according to different mobile collection paths. And then we present several different data collection path examples and show their data collection efficiency. The numerical results show that the optimal mobile collection path should consider both the cooperative zone and the distribution of the underwater nodes.