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© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Nowadays, the increasing availability of commercial off-the-shelf underwater acoustic and non-acoustic (e.g., optical and electromagnetic) modems that can be employed for both short-range broadband and long-range low-rate communication, the increasing level of autonomy of underwater vehicles, and the refinement of their underwater navigation systems pave the way for several new applications, such as data muling from underwater sensor networks and the transmission of real-time video streams underwater. In addition, these new developments inspired many companies to start designing hybrid wireless-driven underwater vehicles specifically tailored for off-shore operations and that are able to behave either as remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) or as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), depending on both the type of mission they are required to perform and the limitations imposed by underwater communication channels. In this paper, we evaluate the actual quality of service (QoS) achievable with an underwater wireless-piloted vehicle, addressing the realistic aspects found in the underwater domain, first reviewing the current state-of-the-art of communication technologies and then proposing the list of application streams needed for control of the underwater vehicle, grouping them in different working modes according to the level of autonomy required by the off-shore mission. The proposed system is finally evaluated by employing the DESERT Underwater simulation framework by specifically analyzing the QoS that can be provided to each application stream when using a multimodal underwater communication system specifically designed to support different traffic-based QoSs. Both the analysis and the results show that changes in the underwater environment have a strong impact on the range and on the stability of the communication link.

Details

Title
Wireless Remote Control for Underwater Vehicles
Author
Campagnaro, Filippo 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Signori, Alberto 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Zorzi, Michele 1 

 Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova via G. Gradenigo 6b, 35121 Padova, Italy; signoria@dei.unipd.it (A.S.); zorzi@dei.unipd.it (M.Z.); Wireless and More srl via della Croce Rossa 112, 35129 Padova, Italy 
 Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova via G. Gradenigo 6b, 35121 Padova, Italy; signoria@dei.unipd.it (A.S.); zorzi@dei.unipd.it (M.Z.) 
First page
736
Publication year
2020
Publication date
2020
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20771312
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2548684084
Copyright
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.