Scheduling multiple mobile sinks in Underwater Sensor Networks

Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) provide valuable data for research studies and underwater monitoring and protection. UWSNs need to overcome the handicap that high data rate wireless transmissions are not available underwater. Acoustic communications are used as a medium but they are only good for transmitting e.g. signalling information. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) can serve as mobile sinks that gather and deliver larger amounts of data from the underwater sensor network nodes. Value of Information (VoI) is a data tag that encodes the importance and time-based-relevance of a data chunk residing at a sensor node. VoI, therefore, can serve as a heuristic for path planning and prioritizing data retrieval from nodes. The novelty of this paper lies in providing algorithms which schedule multiple mobile sinks (AUVs) for data retrieval from nodes while maximizing the retrieved VoI. The class of algorithms discussed are based on greedy heuristics.