AUV-Aided Energy-Efficient Clustering in the Internet of Underwater Things

The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) in our lives has become reality during the last decade. Mostly, IoT is considered a system of systems, where sensors make a big chunk of any IoT communication system. Similarly, in this paper, we introduce a notion of the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT), where we consider a set of sensors deployed in the deep sea to form a communication network for any possible application, such as military, environmental, pollution surveillance, etc. Since it is too optimistic to recharge or replace sensor batteries in an underwater environment, efficient management of the available resources can extend the overall network lifetime. To do so, nodes clustering is a potential solution, however, exchange of multiple packets for cluster head selection requires a considerable amount of energy. In this paper, we present an autonomous unmanned vehicles (AUVs) assisted energy-efficient clustering (AEC) mechanism that introduces wake-up sleep cycle for the underwater nodes. AUV onus includes cluster creation, the cluster head nomination, and creation of a wakeup sleep schedule that relieves the additional burden from energy limited underwater sensor nodes. Due to no additional packets been exchanged, our protocol outperforms traditional clustering schemes and we validate this through simulations.