Interruption-aware Coverage Analysis of Buoy-to-Balloon Communications with Altitude Control in Maritime Sensor Network

Accurately forecasting heavy rainfall disasters requires collecting wide-area maritime weather data obtained by ocean buoys without communication interruption. A low-cost approach to collect these data is a maritime sensor network using altitude-controllable light balloons with only a limited number of altitude controls. This paper analyzes the impact of the altitude controls on the spatial coverage of buoys that establish communication links with balloons within an allowable interruption duration in this maritime sensor network. To this end, this paper formulates a buoy coverage maximization problem with wind-dependent trajectories of altitude-controllable light balloons based on altitude controls and solves this problem. Our simulation results highlighted that the optimally altitudecontrolled balloons communicated with 67% of the buoys without an interruption duration exceeding one hour. Our results also showed that optimally altitude-controlled balloons achieved a 264% larger number of buoys within the allowable interruption than free-floating balloons.