Energy-Efficient Sensor Deployment Strategy for Optimal Coverage of Underwater Events Inspired by Krill Herd

Recently, underwater acoustic sensor networks can be widely applied to various aspects of ocean monitoring. In these applications, one of the critical issues is to improve the coverage efficiency of the monitoring events with minimum energy consumption. Here, we show an energy-efficient sensor deployment strategy to achieve the optimal coverage for events. Inspired by the foraging behavior of krill herd, the movement pattern of krill herd is improved to apply to the sensors with distributed communication to reduce energy consumption. Meanwhile, the coverage threshold is considered to improve the convergence and combined with the information about the surrounding sensors and events to make each sensor move to the optimal position to achieve the optimal coverage with minimum energy consumption. Furthermore, two important performance indexes: 1) coverage efficiency and 2) energy consumption are analyzed to better evaluate the deployment strategy. Simulation results confirm that the proposed deployment strategy performs good energy efficiency and coverage efficiency.