Measurement of distance and speed between transmitter and receiver using propagation time of underwater acoustic communication signals with orthogonal signal division multiplexing

Abstract

Abstract This paper proposes a measurement procedure of transmitter-receiver (Tx-Rx) distance using acoustic communication signals to realize communication and positioning underwater using the same signal and device.
Specifically, we focus on an underwater acoustic (UWA) communication using orthogonal signal division multiplexing, where a pilot signal and message are placed in the time-frequency domain during modulation process to measure the delay and Doppler spreads of the UWA channel.
In this paper, we show that both the measurement of distance and speed between the Tx and Rx are available by utilizing the pilot signal.
We conducted a sea trial and evaluated the performance of the proposed method. 
The obtained results suggest that the proposed method can measure the Tx-Rx distance and speed -- an mean absolute error and the standard deviation error of ranging are 4.0 and 2.7~m, respectively, while those of measurement speed are 0.13 and 0.22 m/s, respectively.