Smooth 3D Dubins Curves Based Mobile Data Gathering in Sparse Underwater Sensor Networks

Sensory data collection is one of the most important concerns in underwater sensor networks (USNs). Because full connectivity cannot be guaranteed, mobile data gathering with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is widely used in sparse three-dimensional (3D) USNs to solve energy-imbalance problems between different sensor nodes. AUVs with relatively abundant energy and storage can collect sensory data from one sensor node to transmit to another node, so as to avoid energy-intensive multi-hop transmission. As a result, movement control strategy and data collecting path planning for AUVs are very crucial for the performance of data acquisition. This paper proposes a smooth 3D Dubins curves based mobile data gathering mechanism to overcome the kinematic nonholonomic constraints of AUVs. The objective of our proposed method is to collect sensory data along smooth 3D Dubins paths, which are interpolated by continuous Bezier curves in the Z-axis from 2D Dubins curves. Extensive simulation results verify that the proposed method has a more efficient performance in terms of path smoothness and energy consumption; thus it is very suitable for mobile data collection in 3D underwater sensor networks.