Bandwidth efficient concurrent localisation and communication in underwater acoustic networks

Localisation is essential for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) to perform its mission and to georeference any data acquired during the dive. When the AUV is part of a heterogeneous underwater acoustic network (UAN), concurrent communications and localisation can be exploited to support AUV operations. However, since acoustic communication is low bandwidth there is the need to reduce the overhead required to exchange localisation data. This paper presents a novel method to efficiently encode and decode localisation information. This results in a lower overhead without impacting the localisation performance. Results are presented from the CommsNet17 sea trial where a network consisting of up to eleven nodes was deployed, including static and mobile nodes.