Underwater localization and node mobility estimation

Abstract

In this paper, localizing a moving node in the context of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) is considered. Most existing algorithms have had designed to work with a static node in the networks. However, in practical case, the node is dynamic due to relative motion between the transmitter and receiver. The main idea is to record the time of arrival message (ToA) stamp and estimating the drift in the sampling frequency accordingly. It should be emphasized that, the channel conditions such as multipath and delay spread, and ambient noise is considered to make the system pragmatic. A joint prediction of the node mobility and speed are estimated based on the sampling frequency offset estimation. This sampling frequency offset drift is detected based on correlating an anticipated window in the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) of the received packet. The range and the distance of the mobile node is predicted from estimating the speed at the received packet and reused in the position estimation algorithm. The underwater acoustic channel is considered in this paper with 8 paths and maximum delay spread of 48 ms to simulate a pragmatic case. The performance is evaluated by adopting different nodes speeds in the simulation in two scenarios of expansion and compression. The results show that the proposed algorithm has a stable profile in the presence of severe channel conditions. Also, the result shows that the maximum speed that can be adopted in this algorithm is 9 km/h and the expansion case profile is more stable than the compression scenario. In addition, a comparison with a dynamic triangular algorithm (DTN) is presented in order to evaluate the proposed system.