A data gathering protocol using AUV in underwater sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a data gathering scheme using the mobile Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) from distributed underwater sensor nodes which are clustered around several cluster header. Unlike conventional schemes where AUV visits either every nodes or cluster headers only in order to gather the data them from nodes, the proposed scheme allows AUV to come by some selected nodes named path-nodes in a way to reduce the overall transmission power. The performance of the proposed protocol is compared with several pre-existing techniques employing AUV for data gathering in terms of throughput, latency and energy consumption. It has been concluded that the proposed data gathering protocol minimizes the energy consumption in large network and improve the lifespan of the nodes.