An environment-friendly spectrum decision strategy for underwater wireless sensor networks

In the underwater environment exist marine mammals and underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), both of which use acoustic signals for communication. However, most of existing researches only focus on the performance, such as energy efficiency, packet error rates and propagation delay, of acoustic communication in UWSNs, which seems not friendly to marine mammals. With the purpose of sharing the scarce acoustic spectrum with marine mammals in a friendly way, an environment-friendly spectrum decision strategy is proposed in this paper. The strategy features a localization scheme for marine mammals and an environment-friendly channel allocation scheme. Based on the estimated locations of marine mammals, the transmission power and available channels are jointly allocated to the contending users. In this way, the proposed strategy can maximize the network capacity while avoiding interference with marine mammals. Simulation results show that the localization scheme has a success rate of localization around 90% and a relatively small average localization error at about 10m; the environment-friendly channel allocation scheme can work effectively as the locations of marine mammals change.