On the optimal placement of underwater sensors in a tree shaped multi-hop hierarchical network

Abstract

We analyze the optimal location of underwater acoustic sensor nodes, with respect to the capacity of the wireless links between the nodes, in a multi-hop hierarchical tree structure based on the information each node has to transfer between underwater levels. A novel algorithm is proposed to calculate the optimal distances between sensor nodes for the proposed hierarchical network. Numerical results for different channel conditions; such as an ideal channel, an imperfect channel with a certain BER, and a channel with interference, are provided. In addition, our algorithm is used to obtain the optimal frequency for each level in the tree shaped network for the above-mentioned conditions.