An energy-balanced head nodes selection scheme for underwater mobile sensor networks

Underwater sensor networks system is a promising technology for smart ocean monitoring applications. To address the imbalance problem of network overhead and limited energy of underwater sensor nodes, this paper presents a CH–SH Selection and Sink Path-planning (CSSP) scheme to collect vast amount of data from heterogeneous sensor nodes. The scheme firstly establishes a three-layer network structure model for underwater mobile sensor networks (UMSN) based on multi-mode communication mechanism and provides energy-balanced head nodes (cluster head and sub-cluster head nodes) selection algorithm based on particle swarm iterative optimization. Then, the optimal global-path-plan of mobile sink is proposed to visit all the head nodes to collect data, reduce the multi-hop underwater acoustic transmission distance of relay nodes, and avoid the energy hole problem. Lastly, the upper-layer multi-hop network of UMSN is designed to remotely control local-path-plan over mobile sink, in order to implement joint planning of global and local paths of mobile sink. Simulation results verified that the proposed CSSP scheme outperformed 11%, 16% and 22% over three typical protocols in terms of nodes energy consumption, CSSP was 9%, 12% and 19% lower than three typical protocols in terms of SD of energy consumption, packet delivery ratio of CSSP was 8%, 10% and 12% higher than three typical protocols. The scheme could significantly balance energy and reduce packet loss rate.