DURIUS: A Multimodal Underwater Communications Approach for Higher Performance and Lower Energy Consumption

Abstract

The exploration of the ocean has got an increasing interest, including activities such as offshore wind farms and deep-sea mining. However, the ocean environment and the high cost of operations, namely for manned missions, have led to the development of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and other sensing platforms. AUVs play a vital role in these environments, relying on communications systems to operate and exchange sensor data. Yet, reliable and energy-efficient broad-band wireless communications underwater remain an unsolved challenge, despite the recent advances in the field. We present a novel multimodal approach, named DURIUS, that considers the movement of the AUV to convey the sensor data and selects the most suitable underwater wireless communications technology - acoustic, optical or radio - according to the underwater context, targeting maximum performance and minimum energy consumption. Our analytical results show that DURIUS increases data throughput and reduces energy consumption when compared with the state of the art approaches.