Abstract
Improving the energy efficiency of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UW-ASNs) is a crucial issue due to the reduced and nonrechargeable energy resource of the underwater sensor nodes. In this work, we address the energy sink hole problem in UW-ASNs while considering the unique and harsh characteristics of the underwater channel. Our goal is to determine the optimal deployment and routing settings that surmount the energy sink hole problem and hence maximize the network lifetime. We prove that sensors can evenly consume their initial battery power provided that first they adjust their transmission power when they transmit the route through traffic and second they are appropriately placed while deployed. Mainly, we propose a deployment scheme and the corresponding balanced routing strategy that lead to uniform energy consumption among all underwater sensors subject to a predefined reliability level at the sink. Specifically, we look for the optimal deployment settings especially in terms of nodes' separation distances that help achieving uniform energy consumption in the network while satisfying the application requirement especially in terms of desired information reliability. Jointly, at the routing layer, we assume that each sensor is provided with the possibility of dynamically adjusting its transmission power up to a given number of levels N. To this goal, we mainly deal with two main cases: fixed and variable nodes separation distance. For the fixed case, we suppose that any two successive nodes in the network are equally spaced, and we strive for deriving the optimal distance as well as the optimal number of transmission power levels along with optimal load weight corresponding to every possible transmission power level for every sensor node. For the variable case, we deal with two subcases: first, we suppose that the distance separating successive nodes follows an arithmetic progression, and second, we assume that the distance separating successive nodes is following a geometric sequence. Note that for both cases, namely, fixed and variable, we succeed to determine the optimal distances separating successive nodes and the optimal number N of transmission power levels along with the corresponding optimal load weight that overcome the energy holes problem, and hence the network lifespan is maximized while respecting the desired reliability level.