A Communication Framework for Networked Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

Underwater acoustic communications consume a significant amount of energy due to the high transmission power (10–50 \(\mathrm {W}\)) and long data packet transmission duration (0.1–1 \(\mathrm {s}\)). Mobile Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) can conserve energy by waiting for the ‘best’ network topology configuration, e.g., a favorable alignment, before starting to communicate. Due to the frequency-selective underwater acoustic ambient noise and high medium power absorption—which increases exponentially with distance—a shorter distance between AUVs translates into a lower transmission loss and a higher available bandwidth. By leveraging the predictability of AUV trajectories, a novel solution is proposed that optimizes communications by delaying packet transmissions in order to wait for a favorable network topology (thus trading end-to-end delay for energy and/or throughput). In addition, the proposed solution exploits the frequency-dependent radiation pattern of underwater acoustic transducers to reduce communication energy consumption. Our solution is implemented and evaluated through emulations, showing improved performance over some well-known geographic routing solutions and delay-tolerant networking solutions.