Value of Information Based Data Retrieval in UWSNs.

Fahad Khan,Sehar Butt,Saad Khan,Damla Turgut,Ladislau Bölöni

doi:10.3390/s18103414

Abstract

Sensor nodes in underwater sensor networks may acquire data at a higher rate than their ability to communicate over underwater acoustic channels. Autonomous underwater vehicles may mitigate this mismatch by offloading high volumes of data from the sensor nodes and ferrying them to the sink. Such a mode of data transfer results in high latency. Occasionally, these networks need to report high priority events such as catastrophes or intrusions. In such a scenario the expectation is to have a minimal end-to-end delay for event reporting. Considering this, underwater vehicles should schedule their visits to the sensor nodes in a manner that aids efficient reporting of high-priority events. We propose the use of the Value of Information metric in order to improve the reporting of events in an underwater sensor network. The proposed approach classifies the recorded data in terms of its value and priority. The classified data is transmitted using a combination of acoustic and optical channels. We perform experiments with a binary event model, i.e., we classify the events into high-priority and low-priority events. We explore a couple of different path planning strategies for the autonomous underwater vehicle. Our results show that scheduling visits to sensor nodes, based on algorithms that address the value of information, improves the timely reporting of high priority data and enables the accumulation of larger value of information.

Highlights

Monitoring in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) has emerged as a subject of active research with applications such as maritime security operations, infrastructure surveillance and maintenance, sea-life monitoring and sea pollutant and contaminant measurements [1,2]
Except for in anomalous cases, Random path planner (RPP) is the worst performing among all path planning algorithms; this is expected as it does not take into account time or information valuation for generating the node visitation sequence
Each reading in the results has been averaged over 100 different value of information (VoI) profiles across the same UWSN map

Summary

Introduction

Monitoring in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) has emerged as a subject of active research with applications such as maritime security operations, infrastructure surveillance and maintenance, sea-life monitoring and sea pollutant and contaminant measurements [1,2]. Radio waves travel only very short distances under water This is because water tends to absorb a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This limitation can be mitigated by using an acoustic communication medium. Acoustic signals can travel long distances underwater but they have relatively high latency and low bandwidth. Such bandwidth maybe sufficient for transmitting compressed data [3] but is not appropriate for large volumes of data such as video recordings

Objectives

Results

Conclusion