SOUNET: Self-Organized Underwater Wireless Sensor Network

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 17; no. 2; p. 283
• Main Authors: Kim, Hee-Won, Cho, Ho-Shin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 02.02.2017; MDPI
• Subjects: closed loop; Connectivity analysis; Energy consumption; Flooding; Malfunctions; network connectivity; Network topologies; Networks; node isolation; Nodes; packet delivery ratio; Packets (communication); Remote sensors; self-healing; self-organization; Sensors; Tables; Underwater; underwater experiment; underwater wireless sensor networks; Wireless networks; Wireless sensor networks; self-organization; network connectivity; closed loop; packet delivery ratio; node isolation; self-healing; underwater wireless sensor networks; underwater experiment
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s17020283

In this paper, we propose an underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) named SOUNET where sensor nodes form and maintain a tree-topological network for data gathering in a self-organized manner. After network topology discovery via packet flooding, the sensor nodes consistently update their parent node to ensure the best connectivity by referring to the timevarying neighbor tables. Such a persistent and self-adaptive method leads to high network connectivity without any centralized control, even when sensor nodes are added or unexpectedly lost. Furthermore, malfunctions that frequently happen in self-organized networks such as node isolation and closed loop are resolved in a simple way. Simulation results show that SOUNET outperforms other conventional schemes in terms of network connectivity, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and energy consumption throughout the network. In addition, we performed an experiment at the Gyeongcheon Lake in Korea using commercial underwater modems to verify that SOUNET works well in a real environment.