Localizing an underwater sensor node using sonar and establishing underwater wireless optical communication for data transfer applications

Abstract

Locating an underwater sensor node over the seabed and acquiring fast, secure data communication between the node and an underwater vehicle could lead to advancements in underwater exploration and marine technology. Currently, the seabed is extensively mapped using multibeam sonar modules, providing detailed information about the bed. Because of its high computational requirements and cost, multibeam sonar is not suitable for this application. The aim of this article is to deploy an experimental setup with a single-beam sonar to localize the node, and then, establish a communication link. The single beam sonar has a 30° beamwidth, which can be improvised to have a full range scan using a custom pan-tilt mechanism setup. To accomplish the full-scale area mapping, underwater servo motors have been used in our customized pan-tilt mechanism. Once the localization is done using a custom pan-tilt mechanism, a line-of-sight optical wireless communication is established with a 200 kbps data rate. The channel is modeled based on the test pool experiments. The channel model is used to simulate underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) to a longer link length and higher data rate. An underwater link length of 3.13 m was achieved at 1 W and 1 Gbps data rate with a Q factor of 6 and BER of 10⁻⁹. For this test setup and simulation parameters, various parameters such as BER and quality factor are examined.

Keywords:

• Underwater sensor node
• single beam sonar
• underwater vehicle
• localization
• marine
• tracking

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the SRMIST for providing resources and lab assistance to conduct the experiment. In addition, authors would like to acknowledge the support of under graduate students Mr. Bhuvan Bhardwaj and Mr. Uttez Pallapothu during the experiment.

Authors’ contributions

Shanthi Prince: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis and investigation, Funding acquisition, Resources, Supervision. Jinka Venkata Aravind: Methodology, Experimental work, Writing – original draft preparation, review and editing, Experimental and Simulation Analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approval

The contents of this manuscript are not now under consideration for publication elsewhere. The contents of this manuscript have not been copyrighted or published previously.

Data availability

Algorithms and dataset can be made available on request to corresponding author.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful to the DRDO Naval Research Board, under the Government of India, for funding this experimental investigation through grant NRB-/4003/PG/445.