Multi-Link and AUV-aided Energy-Efficient Underwater Emergency Response

The recent development of wireless communication has provided many promising solutions to emergency response. To effectively realize the energy-efficient underwater emergency response and adequately harness merits of different underwater communication links (UCL), this article proposes an underwater emergency communication network (UECN) aided by multiple UCLs and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) to collect underwater emergency data. Specifically, we first select the optimal emergency response mode (ERM) for each underwater sensor node (USN) with the help of greedy searching and reinforcement learning (RL), and the "isolated" USNs (IUSN) can be found out. Second, based on the distribution of IUSNs, we dispatch AUVs to assist IUSNs in underwater communication by jointly solving the optimal AUV position and velocity, which can dramatically shorten the amount of time for data collection and motion. Finally, the best tradeoff between response efficiency and energy consumption is achieved by multiobjective optimization, where the amount of time for emergency response and the total energy consumption are simultaneously minimized, subject to a given set of transmit power, signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), outage probability, and energy constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed system significantly improves the response efficiency and overcomes the limitations of existing works, which makes contributions to emergency decision-making.