Measuring and modeling performance of WLAN communication for multistatic sonar applications

It is known that the accumulated contact data of all stations of multistatic sonar arrays cannot be handled by traditional VHF links. While other technologies like satellite communication systems could handle the amount of data, these systems are usually too costly in terms of money, weight, or power consumption to be deployed on sonar buoys. Therefore, we installed commercial off-the-shelf WLAN with 4W boosters on a vessel and buoys and measured the achievable communication ranges and data rates during a sea trial. With our experiments we were able to reach ranges of 10km and beyond. Afterwards we derived functions and parameters from our measured data to help predicting the WLAN performance for similar scenarios.