Tracking a Duty-Cycled Autonomous Underwater Vehicle by Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

The real-time position of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is always of great interest. With advances of technologies, underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) become promising tools for AUV tracking. Due to the energy constraint of underwater nodes, energy saving is a key issue that affects all aspects of the design of a tracking scheme. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-efficient tracking scheme for an AUV to locate itself in time by UWSNs. We first design a tracking protocol considering the energy consumptions in both the AUV and sensor nodes (SNs). Particularly, the protocol is designed in two aspects: 1) the passive listening mechanism and duty-cycle strategy for the AUV and 2) the detection based ranging packet transmission for SNs. Since the tracking protocol will inevitably affect the packet delivery between the AUV and SNs, we analyze the packet delivery success rate (PDSR) to shed light on the impact of system parameters on the tracking performance. To cope with non-linearity of the model and the intermittent observations mainly arisen from the effect of the tracking protocol, we adopt two extended versions of the original intermittent Kalman filter for tracking. They are intermittent extended Kalman filter and intermittent unscented Kalman filter. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracking scheme, and reveal that the PDSR analysis provides a design guidance for parameter selection in system configuration.