Fast Calculation of Underwater Acoustic Horizontal Range: A Guarantee for B5G Ocean Mobile Networks

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicle based mobile networks (AUV-MNs) are utilized in a wide range of marine applications and are likely to play a key role in the implementation of beyond 5G mobile space, air, ground, and sea networks. Communication technology and positioning technology are two key technologies for AUV-MNs, both of which are dependent on the accurate measurement of the underwater acoustic range. Furthermore, with the development of artificial intelligence, the rapid and accurate calculation of underwater acoustic range becomes more important, which affects the decision-making performance of AUV-MNs. In this paper, we propose a fast calculation method of the underwater acoustic horizontal range to guarantee a low-cost, long-endurance AUV-MN ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$l^2$</tex-math></inline-formula> -AUV-MN-2.0). Using this fast calculation method, we can obtain an accurate horizontal range for the AUV-MNs in a simple manner, thus ensuring the performance of the AUV-MNs. We verify the feasibility and the robustness of the proposed method via simulations. Furthermore, this fast calculation method can be used in other types of ocean networks or systems, such as leader-follower based multi-AUVs collaborative operation networks, and underwater cellular-type networks.