Non-Uniform k-Connectivity for Energy-Efficient and Reliable Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks
33rd Telecommunications Forum, TELFOR 2025, Belgrade, Serbia, 25 - 26 November 2025, (Full Text)
- Publication Type: Conference Paper / Full Text
- Doi Number: 10.1109/telfor67910.2025.11314281
- City: Belgrade
- Country: Serbia
- Keywords: energy efficiency, k connectivity, mixed-integer linear programming, reliability, underwater wireless sensor networks
- TED University Affiliated: Yes
Abstract
Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have diverse applications, including coastal monitoring, environmental observation, and defense operations. Resilient underwater missions require reliable connectivity, often realized through k connectivity, where each sensor node sustains at least k disjoint paths to the base station (BS). However, maintaining k paths for every node introduces substantial energy overhead, limiting network lifetime. To address this challenge, we propose a nonuniform k-connectivity scheme, assigning higher k values to critical nodes and lower ones to less critical nodes, for reducing the total energy consumption. We formulate this approach as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model and evaluate it on a coastal UWSN scenario. Our results show that overall energy consumption can increase up to 6.17-fold in a fully 3-connected network compared to the 1 -connected case, whereas non-uniform k-connectivity can reduce this overhead to 4.16-fold, achieving a more balanced trade-off between reliability and energy efficiency.