An Integrated Self-Organization Scheme for Underwater Sensor Networks

In this paper, an integrated self-organization scheme is proposed for tree topological underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) with an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol. This scheme enables many sensor nodes to organize the tree topology in a distributed manner by utilizing just few types of control messages, and handle link-hole problems adaptively with several overheard messages. Additionally, a suitable MAC protocol for the tree-based data-gathering application is proposed. Performance evaluation through computer simulation and lake experiment shows that the proposed scheme works properly, organizing a tree topological network in self and adaptive manner and successfully gathering the data at a sink node located at the top of the hierarchical tree topology.