ANN-Based Control of a Multiboat Group for the Deployment of an Underwater Sensor Network

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Underwater sensor networks (USNs) can be used for several types of commercial and noncommercial applications. However, some constraints resulting from the nature of aquatic environments severely limit their use. Due to constraints such as large propagation latency, low-bandwidth capacity, and short-distance communications, a large number of USN nodes are deployed to provide reliability in most applications. In this study, an unattended deployment approach based on the use of an autonomous boat group is proposed. A map of the deployment zone and optimal locations of USN nodes are fed into the onboard computers of the boat group. After processing these data and determining paths to be followed, the boat group deploys sensor nodes at predetermined locations. During the deployment, the boat group is controlled by an artificial neural network- (ANN-) based control system for reducing path errors. A set of performance evaluations is given to prove efficiency of the proposed control system. Performance results show that the boat group can successfully follow a predefined path set and deploy USN nodes. The tradeoffs between energy consumptions, end-to-end delay, and number of hops between underwater relay nodes of energy-efficient USN are also examined. The results indicate that increasing the number of hops reduces the total energy consumption and the end-to-end delay.