Abstract-Underwater acoustic communication (UAC)system designers tend to transmit as much information as possible, per unit of time, at as low as possible error rate. However, the bit rate achieved in UAC systems is much lower than for wire or radio-communication systems. This is due to disadvantageous properties of the UAC channels, namely the sea and inland waters. Estimation of UAC channel transmission properties is possible within a limited bandwidth and temporal resolution. Thus, the UAC physical layer of data transmission is designed on the basis of roughly estimated channel parameters, or assuming the worst possible conditions. The paper presents the methodology of adapting UAC signaling schemes to tough underwater propagation conditions, through an example of two communication systems designed and developed at the Gdansk University of Technology.
Acoustic underwater communication systems designed to work reliably in shallow coastal waters must overcome major limitations such as multipath propagation and the Doppler effect. These restrictions are the reason for the complexity of receivers being built, whose task is to decode a symbol on the basis of the received signal. Additional complications are caused by the low propagation speed of the acoustic wave in the water and the relatively narrow bandwidth. Despite the continuous development of communication systems using coherent modulations, they are still not as reliable as is desirable for reliable data transmission applications. This article presents an acoustic underwater communication system that uses one of the varieties of the spread spectrum technique i.e., the fast frequency hopping technique (FFH). This technique takes advantage of binary frequency-shift keying (BFSK) with an incoherent detection method to ensure the implementation of a system whose main priority is reliable data transmission and secondary priority is the transmission rate. The compromised choice of parameters consisted of the selection between the narrow band of the hydroacoustic transducer and the maximum number of carrier frequency hops, which results from the need to take into account the effects of the Doppler effect. In turn, the number of hops and the symbol duration were selected adequately for the occurrence of multipath propagations of an acoustic wave. In addition, this article describes experimental communication tests carried out using a laboratory model of the FFH-BFSK data transmission system in the shallow water environment of Lake Wdzydze/Poland. The test results obtained for three channels of different lengths are discussed.
A signal transmitted in an Underwater Acoustic Communication (UAC) system operating in a shallow-water channel suffers from strong time dispersion due to multipath propagation. This causes the Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) observed in the received signal, which significantly limits the communication system’s reliability and transmission rate. In such propagation conditions, the Direct-Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) method is one of the solutions that make reliable data transmission possible. In systems with one-to-one communication, it ensures communication with a satisfactory Bit Error Rate (BER). Additionally, it makes it possible to implement the Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA) protocol in underwater acoustic networks. This paper presents the results of simulation and experimental communication tests on a DSSS-based UAC system using three types of spreading sequence, namely m-sequences, Kasami codes and Gold codes, and occupying different bandwidths from 1 kHz to 8 kHz around a carrier frequency equal to 30 kHz. The UAC channel was simulated by impulse responses calculated by the virtual sources method and the UAC chanel models available in the Watermark simulator. The experimental tests were conducted in a model pool. Based on the obtained results, a transmission rate was estimated, which is possible to achieve in strong multipath propagation conditions, assuming reliability expressed as BER less than 0.001.
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