Like wireless sensor networks, lifetime of sensors is the main constraint for performance of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). Most previous works on UASNs did not consider dynamics of networks, i.e., as time goes by, in practice, part of sensors may be malfunctioned, deplete their battery power, or get lost due to violent underwater environment changes. Therefore, this work considers a UASN in ocean and proposes a sleep scheduling scheme in which sensor nodes and autonomous underwater vehicles in this network can dynamically choose to sleep or work to adapt to the environmental change. The concerned problem is to dynamically determine a sufficient number of active nodes in the UASN at different times, such that the targets required to be detected are covered. A special static scenario of the problem has been shown to be NP-complete. Hence, this work proposes an improved multi-population harmony search algorithm to solve this dynamic problem. By simulation, the proposed algorithm shows high performance in terms of extending network lifetime, robustness, and computing time.

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