Abstract
In recent years, reliable and timely data collection from underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) has attracted widespread attention in academia. For this proposal, we study the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)-based real-time mobile relaying network in UASNs. Relay placement determines the reliability of communication in the relay network. We first formulate the relay positions that can meet a certain frame error rate (FER) requirement as the FER-restricted area (FRA), and approximate the FRA with a three-dimensional ellipsoid mathematical formula. The problem of reliable and timely data collection becomes planning a short AUV relaying trajectory under the different-sized FRA constraints. To this end, we propose a nearest-community (N-C) trajectory planning algorithm and further propose a member grouping method to form communities. Simulation results verify that the approximate FRA is more than 90% consistent with the real FRA and show that the proposed N-C can successfully receive more packets per minute and consume fewer sensors' energy than other algorithms.