Spatial-Temporal Resource Utilization for Partially Connected Multi-AUV Broadcast Scheduling

The long propagation delays in underwater acoustic channels can be leveraged to improve communication efficiency using spatial-temporal reuse techniques. This letter focuses on a system of partially connected AUVs that continuously broadcast packets. A central controller gathers the location information of the AUVs and designs a broadcast sequence exploiting propagation delays to minimize the broadcast cycle. Since finding optimal solutions is time-consuming, we propose a scheduling algorithm that uses heuristics based on partial connections to reduce computational complexity. Additionally, we allow collision tolerance to shorten the broadcast cycle further and investigate the trade-off of the shorter broadcast cycle and collision probability, resulting in a scheduling algorithm exhibiting receiving-alignment properties. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in reducing broadcast cycles while maintaining low computational complexity.