Distributed protocol for communications among underwater vehicles

Abstract

Underwater surveying by swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles presents problems in communication among the robots. These problems involve the bandwidth, power consumption, timing, processing power, and other issues. This paper presents a novel approach to communicate and coordinate effectively among underwater vehicles to accomplish this task successfully. The proposed approach solves issues by reducing the number of hops to conserve power, while reducing computation time and bandwidth, effectively utilizing resources to reduce the load on each node. Finally, the simulation results are presented, in order to prove that the proposed approach improves efficiency and effectiveness in communicating among underwater vehicles.<br /