• A time-delay compensated centralized extended Kalman filter (TD-CEKF) is proposed to mitigate underwater acoustic transmission delays.
• The AUV's mobility is leveraged to optimize USN topology, balancing energy efficiency and tracking accuracy.
• A penalty function and gradient descent method are used to determine the optimal AUV position for topology optimization.
• Simulation results confirm that the proposed approach effectively overcomes delay effects and achieves superior tracking performance.