Multi-AUV Placement for Coverage Maximization in Underwater Optical Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider an underwater optical wireless communication network in which an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) fleet is used to collect information from seabed sensors. Specifically, AUVs cover circular areas or cells and sensors are required to form associations with AUVs for uplink communication. To this end, we propose an efficient algorithm using four-adjacency or eight-adjacency maneuvers to find the optimum AUV positions such that the number of sensors assigned to a cell is maximized. The proposed algorithm, despite its low implementation complexity, achieves near identical coverage as compared to the brute force optimal solution for different parameters such as sensor density, AUV number and height. We also extended our algorithm to consider sensor coverage when they have high/low priority levels.