In oceans, the limited acoustic spectrum resource is heavily shared by marine mammals and manmade systems including underwater sensor networks. In order to limit the negative impact of acoustic signal on marine mammals, we propose an environmentally friendly power control (EFPC) scheme for underwater sensor networks. EFPC allocates transmission power of sensor nodes with a consideration of the existence of marine mammals. By applying a Nash Equilibrium based utility function with a set of limitations to optimize transmission power, the proposed power control algorithm can conduct parallel transmissions to improve the network's goodput, while avoiding interference with marine mammals. Additionally, to localize marine mammals, which is a prerequisite of EFPC, we propose a novel passive hyperboloid localization algorithm (PHLA). PHLA passively localize marine mammals with the help of the acoustic characteristic of these targets. Simulation results show that PHLA can localize most of the target with a relatively small localization error and EFPC can achieve a close goodput performance compared with an existing power control algorithm while avoiding interfering with marine mammals.
Keywords: UWSNs; marine mammals; passive localization; power control.