A Mobile Delay-Tolerant Approach to Long-Term Energy-Efficient Underwater Sensor Networking

Underwater environment represents a challenging and promising application scenario for sensor networks. Due to hard constraints imposed by acoustic communications and to high power consumption of acoustic modems, in underwater sensor networks (USN) energy saving becomes even more critical than in traditional sensor networks. In this paper the authors propose delay-tolerant data dolphin (DDD), an approach to apply delay-tolerant networking in the resource-constrained underwater environment. DDD exploits the mobility of a small number of capable collector nodes (namely dolphins) to harvest information sensed by low power sensor devices, while saving sensor battery power. DDD avoids energy-expensive multi-hop relaying by requiring sensors to perform only one-hop transmissions when a dolphin is within their transmission range. The paper presents simulation results to evaluate the effectiveness of randomly moving dolphins for data collection.