Intelligent autonomous underwater vehicle mobility with energy efficient routing in sensor networks

The primary challenges in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) are energy-efficient data gathering, maximum lifetime of a network, very high energy consumption for data transmission, and constant variation in the topology of the network. Various techniques are proposed to tackle these challenges with different trade-offs. This study presents a novel technique to resolve energy consumption for UWSNs based on intelligent mobility of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). The proposed approach enables the AUV to select the best possible location in the network based on a higher number of sensor nodes, less residual energy of the sensor nodes in the specific area, and a limited delivery ratio from the specific area. The vehicle remains in continuous coordination with the base station sinks and based on the aforementioned parameters, it moves to its new position and collects the data from sensor nodes for maximizing the network lifetime and minimizing the propagation delay. The proposed method also focuses on the intelligent selection of transmission range of sensor nodes based on residual energy of the nodes to maximize the network lifetime and stability period.