The rapid development of autonomous systems and Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) create new opportunities for maritime activities. Existing autonomous systems are becoming more powerful and utilise the capabilities of several types of devices such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs)sometimes referred as Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) -, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), moored and drifting systems and, recently emerging, autonomous vessels. Their importance in providing new services in maritime environments is undeniable and the opportunity for coordinated and interconnected operations is clear. However, continuous wide integration of various technologies in maritime environments still faces many challenges. Operations may take place in remote locations, so that dependence on third-party infrastructures such as satellite communication or terrestrial communication systems must be expected. The reliability, performance, availability, and cost of such systems are important issues that need to be tackled. This work reviews the major advancements on state-of-the-art autonomous maritime vehicles and systems, which are used in several different scenarios, from scientific research to transportation. Moreover, the paper highlights how available technologies can be composed in order to efficiently and effectively operate in maritime environments. Highlights of the trade-off between autonomy and communication requirements are provided and followed by an overview of promising communication and networking technologies that could encourage the integration of autonomous systems in maritime scenarios.

Abstract-In a Bayesian linear model, suppose observation y = Hx+n stems from independent inputs x and n which are Gaussian mixture (GM) distributed. With known matrix H, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator for x, has analytical form. However, its performance measure, the MMSE itself, has no such closed form. Because existing Bayesian MMSE bounds prove to have limited practical value under these settings, we instead seek analytical bounds for the MMSE, both upper and lower. This paper provides such bounds, and relates them to the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR).

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Multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems have great potential in improving information rate, diversity and resistance to against interference. The primary objective of this paper is to derive for broadband signaling a new iterative frequency domain (FD) multiuser MIMO signal detection technique for joint-over-antenna (JA) detection. The proposed detector is based on soft-cancellation and minimum mean square error (MMSE) filtering, followed by maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detector to detect several of each users transmit antennas. The purpose of jointly detecting several transmit antennas is to preserve the degrees of freedom (DoF) for MMSE. Computational complexities with FD and its time domain (TD) counterpart are evaluated in this paper, and it is shown that FD requires significantly lower complexity than TD. Numerical results show that JA significantly outperforms the receiver that detects transmit antenna signals antenna-byantenna (AA). The proposed iterative FD JA technique achieves larger performance gains compared to AA when the total number of transmit antennas is larger than the number of receiver antennas, as well as in the presence of spatial correlation.Index Terms-Multiuser MIMO, spatial multiplexing, turbo coding, iterative processing, frequency domain equalization.

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