Measurement of distance and speed between transmitter and receiver using the propagation time of underwater acoustic communication signals with orthogonal signal division multiplexing

Abstract

Abstract This paper proposes a procedure for measuring transmitter–receiver (Tx–Rx) distance using acoustic communication signals to realize communication and positioning underwater with the same signal and device. Specifically, we focus on an underwater acoustic communication using orthogonal signal division multiplexing, where a pilot signal and messages are placed in the time–frequency domain. In this paper, we show that measurements of both Tx–Rx distance and speed are available by utilizing the pilot signal. We conducted a sea trial and evaluated the performance of the proposed method. During the experiment, the Tx–Rx distance was 50–550 m. The obtained results suggest that the proposed method can measure the Tx–Rx distance and speed in a specific environment. The mean absolute error and the standard deviation error of ranging are 4.0 and 2.7 m, respectively, while those of measurement speed are 0.13 and 0.22 m s−1, respectively.