Joint Network Lifetime Maximization and Relay Selection Design in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

—The paper proposes a new approach to minimize the number of relays while maximizing the lifetime of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). This involves formulating the relay node placement (RNP) problem as a multi-objective optimization problem and employing the multi-objective lexicographic method (MOLM) to solve it. To achieve the optimal solution, the MOLM consists of two steps. First, the problem of lifetime maximization is tackled to find RNP solutions. This transforms the RNP into a non-convex optimization problem which is then converted into a convex programming equivalent. The proposed method has the same computational complexity as previous relay-node adjustment (RA) and difference convex algorithm (DCA) methods. The second step introduces a novel relay node selection to reach the optimal number of relays. Simulation results demonstrate that it has superior network lifetime and efficiency compared to RA and DCA.