PADP: Prediction assisted dynamic surface gateway placement for mobile underwater networks

Abstract

In underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), one efficient way to alleviate the burdens of high propagation delay and high error probability during transmission is to deploy surface-level gateways, which utilize radio waves to forward information to a control station. Usually, deployment of the gateways is considered as an optimization problem with the objective to best satisfy certain parameters. In this work, we propose a prediction assisted dynamic surface gateway placement algorithm for mobile underwater sensor networks, called “PADP”, which intends to maximize the coverage within a specific period of time. PADP applies a tracking scheme “IMM” to predict sensor nodes' positions, adopts branch-and-cut to solve the optimization problem, and employs a disjoint-set data structure to handle connectivity. Simulation results show that PADP outperforms the existing static gateway deployment scheme.