Sensor Deployment Strategies for Target Coverage Problems in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Owing to the dynamic characteristics of the underwater environment, the set of underwater targets needing to be covered and monitored by sensor nodes often exhibits a variety of irregular distributions, bringing a certain burden to node deployment. In this letter, an improved greedy strategy with a depth-first search mechanism was proposed to address the coverage problem of underwater targets. With the optimal selection criteria of deployment location at each step and a flexible search process, the global solution problem was converted into multiple local optimal solution problems to improve solution efficiency. Thus the performance of coverage and connectivity can be effectively guaranteed in underwater scenarios with irregular target distributions. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has superiority in solving the target coverage problem in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), which is manifested in node deployment cost and coverage efficiency.