Event localization in underwater wireless sensor networks using Monitoring Courses

We propose m-courses (Monitoring Courses), a novel solution to localize events in an underwater wireless sensor network. These networks consists of surface gateways and relay nodes. GPS can localize the position of surface gateways which can then distribute their locations through the network using acoustic modems. Relay nodes are deployed to remain static, but these untethered nodes may drift due to water currents, resulting in disruption of communication links. We develop a novel underwater alarm system using a cyclic graph model. In the event of link failure, a series of alarm packets are broadcast in the network. These alarms are then captured by the underwater m-courses, which can also be used to assure network connectivity and identify node failures. M-courses also allow the network to localize events and identify network issues locally before forwarding results upwards to a Surface Gateway node. This reduces communication overhead and allows for efficient management of nodes in a mobile network. Our results show that m-course routing reduces the number of sends required to report an event to a Surface Gateway by up to 80% when compared to a naïve routing implementation.