A survey of techniques and challenges in underwater localization

Abstract

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are expected to support a variety of civilian and military applications. Sensed data can only be interpreted meaningfully when referenced to the location of the sensor, making localization an important problem. While Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers are commonly used in terrestrial WSNs to achieve this, this is in-

RSS-based sensor localization in underwater acoustic sensor networks

“…The RSS values according to each frequency component are obtained according to (3) with d0 = 1, where β = 2 corresponds to an UWA spherical spreading case [17]. We select a number of frequency components and obtain the related α (f ) according to (2).…”

“…Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) are envisioned for oceanographic applications such as pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster prevention, assisted navigation, and tactical surveillance applications, while source localization is another important task. Apart from localization protocol designs [2], researchers paid a lot of attention to four different underwater distance measurement techniques [3] as applied in TWSNs, including time difference of arrival (TDoA), time of arrival (ToA), received signal strength (RSS), and angle of arrival (AoA). ToA is widely employed in underwater source localization works for measuring the distance, e.g., [4], although it demands a precise synchronization among nodes which is challenging in UWSNs.…”

“…AoA relies on a direct line-of-sight (LOS) UWA transmission path which may not exist at all unlike in terrestrial radio [7], while typical multi-path components in UWA channels can also lead to large errors in AoA measurements [8]. RSS-based underwater source localization gets less attention as another alternative to measure distance, since it is difficult to achieve accurate ranging due to multipath propagations and the complicated UWA transmission loss (TL) phenomena [3]. However, it can be argued that for certain water depths, the UWA channels show nice transmission features that fit well to a TL model and thus RSS-based localization can be considered for such cases [9].…”

Long-Term Inertial Navigation Aided by Dynamics of Flow Field Features

“…It is notoriously challenging for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to maintain a consistently reliable navigation performance [1]- [3]. The fast attenuation of electromagnetic waves in water creates a poorly illuminated ocean environment while acoustic communication, the primary communication method for most underwater applications, suffers from large delays and high error rates.…”

Contributed Review: Source-localization algorithms and applications using time of arrival and time difference of arrival measurements

“…has been a subject of research for decades and continues to receive much interest in the signal processing research community, including radar (Bahl andPadmanabhan, 2000 andYan et al, 2007), sonar (Carter, 1981;Leonard and Durrant-Whyte, 1991;and Leonard and Durrant-Whyte, 2012), mobile communications (Caffery, 2000;Gustafsson and Gunnarsson, 2005;and Caffery and Stuber, 1998), multimedia (Brandstein and Silverman, 1997;Wang and Chu, 1997;and Akyildiz et al, 2007), animal tracking (Spiesberger and Fristrup, 1990), wireless sensor networks (WSNs; Akyildiz et al, 2002;Chen et al, 2002;Patwari et al, 2005;and Mao et al, 2007), and the Global Positioning System (GPS; Hofmann-Wellenhof et al, 2013). However, uncertainties resulting from the modulation of a signal propagated through an inhomogeneous medium and in measurements of received signals can quickly degrade position estimation accuracy when using standard methods to estimate transmitter position (Sayed et al, 2005;Güvenç and Chong, 2009;and Tan et al, 2011). For reference, the acronyms commonly used in the study of transmitter position estimation and adopted by this paper are listed in Table I.…”