AUV-Aided Optical—Acoustic Hybrid Data Collection Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)-assisted mobile data collection in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) has received significant attention because of their mobility and flexibility. To satisfy the increasing demand of diverse application requirements for underwater data collection, such as time-sensitive data freshness, emergency event security as well as energy efficiency, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal AUV-assisted data collection scheme which integrates both acoustic and optical technologies and takes advantage of their complementary strengths in terms of communication distance and data rate. In this scheme, we consider the age of information (AoI) of the data packet, node transmission energy as well as energy consumption of the AUV movement, and we make a trade-off between them to retrieve data in a timely and reliable manner. To optimize these, we leverage a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach to find the optimal motion trajectory of AUV by selecting the suitable communication options. In addition to that, we also design an optimal angle steering algorithm for AUV navigation under different communication scenarios to reduce energy consumption further. We conduct extensive simulations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, and the results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the weighted sum of AoI as well as energy consumption.