Virtual unequal error protection in underwater image transmission

Due to its applications in marine research, oceanographic, and undersea exploration, underwater communication has been recently under intense investigation. In the last years, several works have studied the communication between autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). Although underwater communication has been improving its performance (in terms of bandwith, QoS, etc.), image transmission in AUVs networks is still considered a frontier work. Here, we address progressive image transmission for AUVs fleet. By taking into consideration the tight constraints imposed by the underwater channel, we propose a method able to improve the performance by exploiting the feature of the progressive images. Several scenarios have been investigated to demonstrate the benefit of the proposed model, focusing on the tradeoff between QoS vs. delays and energy consumption.