Ecologically Friendly Full-Duplex Data Transmission Scheme for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have been proposed as a promising way in supporting the Underwater-Internet-of-Things (UIoT) applications. However, to guarantee and improve Quality of Service (QoS), they are still facing great challenges especially when it comes to enabling reliable data communication for the UIoT applications and meanwhile protecting the marine ecosystems for sustainable underwater monitoring and exploration; this is because the acoustic signals used by UASNs can do harmful interference to vocalizing marine mammals. Therefore, the article proposed an ecologically friendly data transmission scheme for UASNs, which adopts an interference-aware opportunistic route discovery method and a frequency-division multiplexing (FDM)-based full-duplex communication scheme. First, in the route discovery phase, a virtual-void zone scheme, an FDM-based channel allocation approach and a Bayesian network-based mammal avoidance strategy is introduced to establish interference-free routing paths for enabling reliable and environmentally friendly data transmissions. Then during the data transmission phase, an FDM-based full-duplex communication technique is adopted to enable high-speed data flow from the seabed to the surface. Extensive simulations indicate that the proposed scheme has excellent advantages in terms of QoS while also taking marine mammals into account since the signal interference to both underwater nodes and nearby vocalizing mammals is significantly mitigated.