electromagnetic communications within swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have great value as platforms for sensors. While traditional AUVs have been large platforms that tend to operate alone or in very small groups, there has been recent interest in using very large numbers of small AUVs in swarms. Such swarms offer the potential to increase sensor density within the same, or lower, system cost. In this paper, we compare via simulation the network throughput obtained in such a swarm using electromagnetic and acoustic signals. The results of these simulations suggest that, for the same raw channel bit rate, much higher throughputs (by up to more than one order of magnitude) can be obtained using electromagnetic signals than can be obtained using acoustic signals, and that careful choice of parameters such as carrier frequency can help optimize performance.
underwater vehicles auv underwater communications underwater networks