A Chinese navy survey ship will start mapping the seabed off the west Australian coast this week as part of the latest phase in the search for the missing Malaysian airliner, officials said on Monday.

Chinese, Australian and Malaysian authorities met in Fremantle in Western Australia at the weekend and agreed that the Chinese ship Zhu Kezhen would survey the Indian Ocean floor as directed by Australian air crash investigators, Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre said in a statement.

The Canberra-based centre said the ship was scheduled to sail for the survey area on Wednesday, weather permitting.

Officials believe the Malaysia Airlines MH370 flight that vanished with 239 passengers and crew on 8 March during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing veered far off course and crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

After an initial air and seabed search failed to find any trace of the wreckage, authorities this month announced a new phase over a vastly expanded seabed search area covering 60,000 square kilometres. The new phase also involves mapping of the seabed where depths and topography are in parts largely unknown.

Negotiations are under way to bring in powerful sonar equipment to scour the seabed for wreckage that could be in water more than 7km deep.

The original ocean floor search of an area of less than 400 sq km, where a sound consistent with aircraft black box was thought to have emanated from, was conducted by a US navy unmanned sub, the Bluefin 21, near its 4.5km depth limit.

The Bluefin 21 had continued searching an ever widening area until a communications problem was discovered last week involving the transponders on the sub and the Australian navy ship that tows it, Ocean Shield.

The centre said Ocean Shield had arrived on Sunday at the Australian west coast port of Geraldton, where preparations were under way to install spare transponder parts to both the ship and sub.