A comprehensive study of the Bellhop algorithm for underwater acoustic channel modelings

Ray tracing is one of the most conventional methods for modeling underwater acoustic sound propagation, and the Bellhop algorithm is a highly effcient ray tracing program, written by Michael Porter as part of the Acoustic Toolbox. In this abstract, based on the introduced Bellhop algorithm, we select several typical underwater acoustic environments so as to study how to model their channels and analyze their channel properties. Simulation results will investigate the following aspects of channel modeling and perperties: ray tracing, eigen-ray tracing, coherent transmission loss, channel impulse reposne, coherence time. In addition, simulation results will compare the performance difference with variant environmental parameters, such as sound speed anomaly and wavy surface.