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A Distributed Algorithm for Automatically Constructing Underwater 3D Wireless Sensor Networks
Weiqiang Shen, Wei Liu and Ruiyan Han

The construction of underwater wireless sensor networks is an interesting and practical problem, and many efforts have been made in the existing literature. However, most researchers mainly focused on the network topology, the layout pattern of sensors and the related coverage and connectivity issues, while few works concern the construction algorithms for underwater wireless sensor networks, especially, the distributed construction algorithm. In this paper, we aim to devise a distributed algorithm to automatically construct an underwater 3D wireless sensor network to completely cover a specified underwater three-dimensional area. To achieve this goal, we first analyse the cube pattern which is an effective layout pattern with a guarantee of network coverage and connectivity. Then, we propose an effective distributed algorithm to drive the mobile sensors to move to the desired positions automatically, so that they eventually construct an underwater wireless sensor network that provides underwater three-dimensional full coverage in the specified area. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed distributed outperforms Hungarian and HungarianK in terms of maximum movement distance and duration ,and based on the proposed distributed algorithm all of the sensors can move to their desired positions and eventually form an underwater 3D full coverage in a finite time with a guarantee, no matter how they are initially distributed, which proves the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords: underwater wireless sensor networks, three-dimensional full coverage, mobile Sensor, distributed algorithm.