Deployment Strategy Analysis for Underwater Geodetic Networks

Abstract

Seafloor geodetic network (SGN) is the foundation for building an underwater positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) system. Traditional network deployment mainly focuses on the deployment of underwater sensor network nodes. However, for SGN, there is no surface buoy node and submarine buoy node, and the number of anchors is limited because it is quite expensive to fully cover large scale areas. To achieve wide coverage and good positioning service of each set of underwater base stations, we focus on the network design of a single set of reference stations in this paper. We propose several deployment plans for a local SGN and then analyze their service quality indicators by considering the stratification effect caused by non-uniformly distributed sound speed. To evaluate the performance of each topology of SGN, we compare their coverage range, horizontal dilution precision (HDOP) and accuracy performance of positioning tests. Based on the overall performance in our simulation, we believe that the star five-node topology is a good topology design under sufficient economic conditions.