The analysis of hops for multi-hop cooperation in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) have recently attracted significant attention for exploration and monitoring in underwater environments. The sensor nodes used in UASNs are powered by batteries that are difficult to recharge or replace. It is imperative that the number of hops deployment in multi-hop networks should be very energy efficient whilst at the same time satisfying necessary delay constraints. In this paper, we firstly analyze the relationship of energy consumption, end-to-end delay and number of hops in a multi-hop UASN, and then we investigate how to optimize the number of hops with a fixed distance in term of trade-offs between energy consumption and end-to-end delay. Then we define a cost function to research the minimum number of hops. Simulation results show that, taking into consideration the energy consumption and end-to-end delay, we can obtain an appropriate number of hops for the multi-hop UASN by adopting co-operation over a given distance. The model obtained in this paper is used to determine the number of hops in an energy efficient UASN for an underwater time-critical mission.