An Intelligent Agent-Based Localization System in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Introduction

In modern era, the applications of wireless network increases rapidly due to its several flexibility and usage. It has several variations in terms of applications like wireless ad-hoc network or WANET, mobile ad-hoc network or MANET, vehicular ad-hoc network or VANET, the combination of several ad-hoc networks or HANET and wireless sensor network or WSN. The current paper is based on UWSN which stands for Underwater Wireless Sensor Network. It is a subset of WSN. UWSN is a collection of several autonomous nodes named as sensor nodes, vehicle nodes, and Base Station (BS) nodes (Yang et al., 2019). UWSN is a collection of different nodes based on several variations based on their working principle and location in the application area. Many sensor nodes interconnect each other and send the collected information to the surface sink or the buoy station. BS collection basic information from all cluster and process it for future references through satellite or onshore sink node. The combination of all nodes spreads or deployed in particular acoustic region to achieve a specific goal. The purpose of the nodes is to monitor underwater environmental condition and sense different homogeneous or heterogeneous elements and collect this data and send it to the BS that is situated outside of the water. In underwater, there are three types nodes are available such as static nodes, dynamic nodes, and semi-static nodes (Jain & Hussain, 2020; Akyildiz et al., 2005).

The UWSN rapidly used in several applications such as ocean sampling, distributed tactical surveillance, various military application, assisted navigation, disaster management, undersea exploration, seismic diagnosis and imagination, etc. Although, there are several usages of the UWSN, but without position information of each node in the network applications are illogical.

Many algorithms in WSN use GPS connectivity for the localization. But in UWSN GPS is very cost effective and in some cases GPS cannot be applicable in the harsh under water environment. So there requires availability of one smart node which moves in the sensing area by creating a proper path such that it can communicate to all the un-localized nodes. This node is called mobile ubiquitous LAN extensions (MULE). various authors have proposed different path planning models such as namely, random way point, Scan, D-Scan, Hilbert, and Circles having some issues such as location accuracy, coverage etc. (Mishra et al., 2018).

Hence, there is need of some intelligent and efficient technique that reduces the above mentioned issues and performs any operation efficiently. The current paper is based on localization system using an intelligent agent. The intelligent agent called data MULE play the role of optimization and solve different location accuracy, energy conservation and extending life time of the network of the network. In last decade, several heuristic, meta-heuristic, nature-inspired algorithms are proposed by the different authors to solve different issues of the WSN as well as UWSN. The proposed method is the extension of the works (Mishra et al., 2018; Mishra et al., 2018) which is based on “Scan” model of the WSN named as “Improved Scan Model”. Details of the proposed work are described later section.

The roadmap the paper as follows. Unit 2 described some information about existing works. Unit 3 illustrated the main proposed method. Unit 4 described simulation analysis. And Unit 5 concludes the paper.