Heurstic approaches for underwater sensing and processing deployment

Limited bandwidth and high propagation delay are two significant challenges in the field of underwater sensor networks. Underwater processing nodes enhance the performance of underwater sensor networks by efficiently using channel capacity, reducing end-to-end delay, and extending the network lifetime. Underwater processing nodes can perform local computations (in-network processing), such as compression, mining, and feature extraction, on the collected data before transmission. The locations of processing nodes have to be carefully chosen to maximize the benefits in a cost-effective way. In this paper, three heuristic approaches are proposed to efficiently solve the processing node deployment optimization problem. The simulation results confirm the benefits of the proposed algorithms for solving such NP problems. The results were compared with the optimal solution and suggest that these heuristics are nearly optimal for practical cases.