Battery Lifetime Estimation and Optimization for Underwater Sensor Networks
AbstractAcoustic technology has been established as the exclusive technology that provides robust underwatercommunications for military and civilian applications. One particular civilian application of interest is thedeployment of underwater acoustic sensor networks. The main challenges of deploying such a network are thecost and the limited battery resources of individual sensor nodes. Here, we provide a method that addresses thesechallenges by estimating the battery lifetime and power cost of shallow water networks, in terms of four independentparameters: (1) internode distance; (2) transmission frequency; (3) frequency of data updates; and (4) number ofnodes per cluster. Because transmission loss in water is dependent on both frequency and distance, we extend thegeneral method to exploit topology-dependent distance and frequency assignments. We use the method to estimatethe battery life for tree, chain, and grid topologies for various combinations of internode distance, frequency andcluster size in a shallow water setting. The estimation results reveal that topology-dependent assignments prolongbattery life of the tier-independent method by a factor of 1.05 to 131 for large networks. In the case of a linearnetwork deployed along a coastline with a target battery life of 100 days, topology-dependent assignments couldincrease the network range and aggregated sensor data of the topology-independent method by a factor of 3.5.Index TermsWireless sensor networks, location-dependent and sensitive, general systems theory, distributed systems,clustering, network topology, network communications, wireless communication, distributed networks.