AUV-Aided Hybrid Data Collection Scheme Based on Value of Information for Internet of Underwater Things

The current Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) for marine observations and emergency responses suffers from two critical issues: 1) energy efficient and 2) timely data collection. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), serving as tools for collecting and forwarding distributed data, can deal with the unbalanced power consumption in a traditional multihop underwater communication network. However, the low speed of the AUV has not been able to guarantee the timeliness of delay-sensitive data. In this article, we introduce a hybrid data collection scheme (HDCS), taking both real-time data collection and energy efficiency (EE) issues into consideration. All sensor nodes (SNs) are first clustered based on their locations in the network. We develop an analytic expression to describe the attenuation of Value of Information (VoI), involving the relationship between the importance degree and timeliness; initial VoI could be measured by historical data. The emergency can be recognized by the presented criterion, and the transmission mode of cluster heads (CHs) in the same layer is judged by CHs themselves according to VoI. The selected CHs shall transmit the urgent data via multihop routing to avoid over attenuation of VoI. The normal data are collected by AUVs visiting all remaining CHs, and the shortest trajectory is achieved by addressing a variation of the classic traveling salesman problem (TSP). Our simulation experiments show that this mechanism can effectively increase long-term VoI while significantly improving EE.