Reliability and Safety Modeling and Analysis for Underwater Communication Link Considering Uncertainty Shocks

Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) are indispensable to modern marine operations, performing critical tasks such as anti-submarine reconnaissance, underwater resource exploration, and multi-platform collaborative search-and-rescue. As underwater communication system serves as the fundamental basis for mission success for UUV systems, generally, their reliability and safety of it should be estimated during the mission planning phase. The reliability and safety estimation of the communication link is a precondition for that of the system, and therefore this paper establishes a comprehensive evaluation model integrating link reliability and safety: it adopts the BELLHOP model to rectify limitations of traditional link analysis methods, enhancing its adaptability to complex marine environments, and combines the Monte Carlo method for link task reliability assessment. An illustrative shallow-sea case verifies that the proposed model outperforms traditional path loss-based methods in prediction accuracy, thus confirming its validity for UUV communication link evaluation. To demonstrate the engineering value of the proposed model, an underwater search-and-rescue backhaul communication application is adopted.