Simulation of the communication system between an AUV group and a surface station
Daria A. Burtovaya, Anton Y. Demin, Maria Demeshko, Alexander Nikolaevich Moiseev, Alexandra V. Kudryashova · Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2017
An object model for simulation of the communications system of an autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) group with a surface station is proposed in the paper.Implementation of the model is made on the basis of the software package "Object Distribution Simulation".All structural relationships and behavior details are described.The application was developed on the basis of the proposed model and is now used for computational experiments on the simulation of the communications system between the autonomous underwater vehicles group and a surface station. IntroductionThe World Ocean covers about 70% of the earth surface.However, according to various sources, its depths are studied for 2%-7%.In order to increase this percentage, mankind is constantly inventing new equipment.In that way, the first autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) called "Special Purpose Underwater Research Vehicle" was invented in 1957 at the University of Washington [1].AUV is a robot which outwardly resembles a torpedo and moves under water without any human assistance with the purpose of obtaining information on bottom configuration and the presence of any objects or obstacles there.The vehicle is capable of reaching the depth of up to 6 km, moving along the programmed trajectory, carrying out the required work and returning to the surface station after the program completion.The surface station is a watercraft or a shore base carrying out control and receiving messages from AUV.More detailed information about AUV can be obtained in [2][3][4].AUV operates autonomously underwater without any connecting cable.Transmission of commands aboard the vehicle and telecommunication back is carried out with the help of the hydroacoustic communication system.Application of the hydroacoustic channel imposes certain restrictions on the communications system.The point is that AUV is usually applied not one at a time, but in groups.Accordingly, a rather low rate of transmitting information along the hydroacoustic channel (at present time, it is not more than 50 kilobits per second [5,6]) is supplemented by the restriction on the number of concurrent communication sessions.More specifically, the number of such sessions at a time point must be equal to 1, while, otherwise, several sessions can initiate critical destructive interference for each other.Consequently, there arises a timely scientific task to analyze and optimize the operation of the AUV group and a surface station communication network.The apparatus of the Queuing Theory [7,8] is the most suitable for handling the above stated task.In terms of the Queuing Theory, such communications systems are simulated as cyclic systems (also called polling systems) [9][10][11].Quite a