AUV-aided communication method for underwater mobile sensor network

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are getting growing interest because of wide-range applications. However, the underwater acoustic communication technology is constrained by the nodes' continuous movement, limited communication bandwidth and node energy, which bring great challenges to UWSNs. In order to handle these challenges and to achieve an efficient energy consumption, many researches have been carried. A significant problem in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) is the difficulty of energy limit. This paper proposes an AUV-aided acoustic communication protocol, namely AA-RP (AUV-Aided Routing Method Integrated Path Planning), which integrates the AUV's dynamic path planning algorithms into the routing protocol. This integrated communication method relies on two phases: AAR (AUV-Aided Network Routing) and RAPP (Routing Aided Path Planning). AA-RP utilizes the cooperation of multi-tasks to reduce energy consumption for network and avoids hot spot and zone problem with a dynamic GN (Gateway Node) schemes. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we make the simulation with NS3, which contains a UAN (Underwater Acoustic Network) module. The simulation results show that the method can reduce the network energy consumption with a good delivery ratio.