Heterogeneous Multi-AUV Aided Green Internet of Underwater Things

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been envisaged as a key enabler for empowering the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) networks to address the challenge of ever-increasing demand of ocean exploration. However, the energy constraint of AUVs' movement makes it challengeable to obtain full-space movement and extravagant information exchange considering complex underwater environment and hostile acoustic channel characteristics. For the sake of enhancing the sustainability of the power supply, it is significant to design a green underwater information collection scheme for beneficially utilizing the maneuverability of AUVs. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous multi-AUV aided underwater information collection scheme for optimizing the unit energy consumption under the constraint of the age of information (AoI). Moreover, the limited service M/G/1 vacation queueing system is used to model the process of information exchange, where the steady-state distribution and the waiting time of queue are derived. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme and low-complexity solution, which outperform single-AUV scheme in terms of both energy efficiency and AoI.