Coordinated multi-surface gateway redeployment for enhanced performance in underwater sensor networks

Optimal deployment of multi-surface gateways is a challenging task that has been shown to improve the performance of underwater sensor networks (UWSN). However, the dynamics of both the surface gateways and the underlying sensor deployments can impair the benefits of an initial deployment. In this paper we opt to tackle the dynamics of the underwater environment by adaptive redeployment of the surface gateways. Surface-gateways decide on the timing of the redeployment by keeping track of the transmission power used by nodes during communications. They coordinate their redeployment plan based on the outcome of an optimization algorithm to find the best global solution to minimize the overall transmission power level used by all the nodes in the network. We have used greedy heuristics to solve the optimization problem to cope with processing limitations of UWSN nodes. Our results show that our strategy results in a reduction in the overall energy consumption and the average end to end delay.