Wireless Sensor Networks for Underwater Localization: A Survey

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have widely deployed in marine investigation and ocean exploration in recent years. As the fundamental information, their position information is not only for data validity but also for many real-world applications. Therefore, it is critical for the AUV to have the underwater localization capability. This report is mainly devoted to outline the recent advancement of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) based underwater localization. Several classic architectures designed for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network (UASN) are briefly introduced. Acoustic propagation and channel models are described and several ranging techniques are then explained. Many state-of-the-art underwater localization algorithms are introduced, followed by the outline of some existing underwater localization systems.