Algorithm and Experimental Verification of Underwater Acoustic Communication Based on Passive Time-Reversal Mirror

The underwater acoustic communication is characterized by doubly spread channels, which are the delay spread due to multiple paths and the doppler spread due to environmental fluctuations or a moving platform. An equalizer is used to remove the inter-symbol interferences that the delay spread causes, but an equalizer doesn`t use an acoustic environment such as a multipath. However, a passive time-reversal mirror is simpler than an equalizer because a matched filter is implemented numerically at the receiver structure along with one-way propagation. In this paper, a passive time-reversal mirror is applied to remove interferences due to a multipath in sea-going experimental data in East Sea in Oct. 2010 and improved communication performance is confirmed. The performance is verified by comparing the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio before/after passive time-reversal mirror. It is also performed independently of the passive time-reversal mirror and adaptive equalizer and the bit error rate is compared to verify the performance of underwater acoustic communication.