UAV-Aided Cooperative Data Collection Scheme for Ocean Monitoring Networks

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal Vol. 8; no. 17; pp. 13222 - 13236
• Main Authors: Ma, Ruofei, Wang, Ruisong, Liu, Gongliang, Meng, Weixiao, Liu, Xiqing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.09.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Autonomous underwater vehicles; Data collection; Decomposition; Frequency division multiple access; Graph matching; Graph theory; Ground stations; Hovering; Iterative algorithms; Iterative methods; Mixed integer; Multiple access; Nodes; NOMA; ocean monitoring networks (OMNs); Optimization; Radio equipment; Radio frequency; Relays; Remote monitoring; Resource allocation; Sea surface; Search algorithms; underwater acoustic communication; Underwater acoustics; Underwater communication; Underwater detectors; unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV); Unmanned aerial vehicles; Wireless communications
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2021.3065740

In this article, we present an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided ocean monitoring network for remote oceanic data collection, in which monitoring data are transmitted first from battery-powered underwater sensor nodes (USNs) to sea surface sink nodes (SNs) in a data collection cycle using underwater acoustic communication, and then a UAV hovering in air collects all the data from SNs and relays them to a ground base station via wireless communication links. Aiming at maximizing network lifetime, we model the resource allocation, USN-to-SN access, and SN-to-UAV access issues as a mixed-integer nonconvex optimization problem. To efficiently solve it, we decompose the optimization into two stages. The first stage is to minimize time consumption in an SN-to-UAV nonorthogonal multiple access process and we solve it by designing a UAV deployment scheme, a subchannel matching scheme, and a joint power and time allocation scheme, based on which, the second stage is to maximize the residual energies of USNs in USN-to-SN transmissions under a modified frequency-division multiple access strategy in each collection cycle. The second-stage optimization is further decomposed into some similar subproblems, and each of them is considered as a bipartite graph matching problem between USNs and underwater acoustic channels. For each subproblem, we propose improved weight-based matching and bisection-based searching algorithms. Finally, we design a low-complexity iteration algorithm to approximate the optimal solution of the original problem by solving these subproblems. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposals.