Minimum-Latency Aggregation Scheduling in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract-Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) can enable a broad range of applications; data aggregation is a fundamental task in such multi-hop wireless sensor networks. To the best of our knowledge, none of existing research works have addressed the interference-free data aggregation scheduling problem in UWSNs. In this paper, we formally define the data aggregation model in UWSNs. We propose a realistic aggregation scheduling scheme together with its theoretical latency bound R_h(C(Δ - 1) + D), where R_h and Δ are the hop radius and the max degree of the network respectively while C and D is a constant. Specifically, we introduce the concept of Virtual Slot to efficiently exploit multiplexing opportunities of time domain. Compared with naively adapted terrestrial algorithms, the evaluation results show that our proposed algorithm achieve far better performance especially when the packet size is small or the node density is high.