Experimental Evaluation of RF Modems for Use in Fleets of Multiple Cooperating Autonomous Undersea Vehicles

This paper presents the results of the experimental evaluation of three radio frequency (RF) modems for use as communication infrastructure among multiple surfaced cooperating autonomous undersea vehicles (AUVs), gateway buoys, and land or ship based operators. RF modems are inherently more complex than their wired counterparts which makes it difficult to estimate the performance they deliver to an application. Throughput, communication latency, and latency variation (jitter) are used as the measures of performance. The experiments were designed to subject the modems to the traffic patterns common in the AUV fleets. The results of the presented experiments should help to set realistic expectations of RF modem performance and aid in the design of comprehensive communication solutions for AUVs.