Congestion-aware signaling aggregation scheme for cellular based Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network (UASN) is the enabling technology for a wide range of applications including naval surveillance, oil platform monitoring, earthquake forewarning, climate and ocean observation, and water pollution tracking. However, considering the enormous acoustic sensor devices and unique services of UASN, some challenges are emerging to the traditional cellular access and core networks, especially the congestion problem due to simultaneously MTC traffic and signaling. Following this paradigm, the purpose of this paper is to support and optimize the signaling aggregation of UASN services based on cellular network. Taking LTE network as the example access network, a congestion-aware signaling aggregation scheme is designed considering the various requirements of UASN services and the congestion situation in the network entity. Theoretical analysis and experimental simulations show that this scheme can improve the system efficiency and greatly alleviate the signaling congestion, especially for the emergency UASN service.