Underwater target localization in the presence of asynchronous clock and noise measurement

Most applications of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) rely upon accurate location information of target. However, the asynchronous clock and noise measurement characteristics of underwater environment make target localization more challenging as compared to the terrestrial sensor networks. In this paper, we design an asynchronous localization algorithm for UASNs, where the synchronous clock assumption is relaxed. In order to reduce the influence of noise measurement, a consensus-based unscented Kalman filtering (UKF) algorithm is proposed to obtain the location of target. Finally, simulation results are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. It is demonstrated that the proposed localization method can effectively improve the localization accuracy.