Underwater source localization problems are complicated and challenging: a) the sound propagation speed is often unknown and the unpredictable ocean current might lead to the uncertainties of sensor parameters (i.e. position and velocity); b) the underwater acoustic signal travels much slower than the radio one in terrestrial environments, thus resulting into a significantly severe Doppler effect; c) energy-efficient techniques are urgently required and hence in favour of the design with a low computational complexity. Considering these issues, we propose a simple and efficient underwater source localization approach based on time difference of arrival (TDOA) and frequency difference of arrival (FDOA) measurements, which copes with unknown propagation speed and sensor parameter errors. The proposed method mitigates the impact of the Doppler effect for accurately inferring the source parameters (i.e. position and velocity). The Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) for this kind of localization are derived and, moreover, the analytical study shows that our method can yield the performance that is very close to the CRLB, particularly under small noise. The numerical results not only confirm the above conclusions but also show that our method outperforms other competing approaches.

In the framework of the large-scale wireless sensor networks involved in the Internet-of-Things (IoT), analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) must target ever increasing levels of power efficiency and amenability to ultra-scaled CMOS technologies. Digitally intensive architectures and smart conversion algorithms are therefore the fuel of future ultra-low power (ULP) designs. The minimization of the output average bitrate is an effective way to maximize the system energy efficiency. Level-crossing-sampling (LC) ADCs are a class of converters that addresses such problem. In their conventional implementation, however, they are mainly impaired by analog blocks (i.e. the high-performance comparators), difficult to be designed in deep nanoscale CMOS. This paper describes a highly-digital frequency-domain implementation of a LC ADC, which replaces the analog comparators with an oscillator-based quantizer and simple digital logic. LC is performed in the digital frequency-domain, where the application of adaptive-resolution algorithms to further enhance power efficiency becomes straightforward. Behavioral modeling simulations demonstrate the appropriateness of the proposed topology by comparing it with the conventional designs and by evaluating the impact of the oscillator-based-quantizer nonidealities on the ADC performance.