The Meandering Current Mobility Model and its Impact on Underwater Mobile Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater mobile acoustic sensor networks are promising tools for the exploration of the oceans. These networks require new robust solutions for fundamental issues such as: localization service for data tagging and networking protocols for communication. All these tasks are closely related with connectivity, coverage and deployment of the network. A realistic mobility model that can capture the physical movement of the sensor nodes with ocean currents gives better understanding on the above problems. In this paper, we propose a novel physically-inspired mobility model which is representative of underwater environments. We study how the model affects a range-based localization protocol, and its impact on the coverage and connectivity of the network under different deployment scenarios.