Cooperative Position Aware Mobility Pattern of AUVs for Avoiding Void Zones in Underwater WSNs

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Mar 13;17(3):580. doi: 10.3390/s17030580.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two schemes; position-aware mobility pattern (PAMP) and cooperative PAMP (Co PAMP). The first one is an optimization scheme that avoids void hole occurrence and minimizes the uncertainty in the position estimation of glider's. The second one is a cooperative routing scheme that reduces the packet drop ratio by using the relay cooperation. Both techniques use gliders that stay at sojourn positions for a predefined time, at sojourn position self-confidence (s-confidence) and neighbor-confidence (n-confidence) regions that are estimated for balanced energy consumption. The transmission power of a glider is adjusted according to those confidence regions. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes outperform the compared existing one in terms of packet delivery ratio, void zones and energy consumption.

Keywords: acoustic communication; autonomous underwater vehicle; cooperative routing; underwater glider; underwater wireless sensor networks; void zone.