A Cluster-Based Mobile Data-Gathering Scheme for Underwater Sensor Networks

In this paper, a new distributed Cluster-based Mobile Data-Gathering scheme (CMDG) for large-scale Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) is proposed to improve the system performance in terms of routing scalability, energy saving, and data gathering latency. In this scheme, a subset of underwater sensors is selected as cluster heads to collect data from affiliated sensors and transmit the data to an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Then, the AUV tour is planned such that all cluster heads are visited while shortening the tour length of the AUV. Using extensive simulation study, we analyse the performance of CMDG and show that it can effectively reduce the tour length while prolonging the network lifetime compared to another existing mobile data-gathering approach.