Performance evaluation of acoustic network for underwater autonomous vehicle in confined spaces

As a kind of small size mobile platform, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) are playing more and more important role in different marine fields such as underwater monitoring and construction. While acoustic communication offer an effective communication link for AUV, under the confined spaces in which small AUVs usually work, the structured obstacles and closure or semi-closure barriers pose serious challenges to communication link due to acoustic sheltering and significant reverberation. The underwater acoustic network is capable of improving acoustic connectivity of AUV via the distributed communication link of different nodes. In this paper, an acoustic network is designed and evaluated for communication support of AUV in a small lake with dense piers. While the presence of piers lead to obvious performance degradation of point-to-point acoustic communication, the experimental results verified the effectiveness of acoustic network for improving connectivity of AUV in confined space.