The Sonar Simulation Toolset

The Sonar Simulation Toolset, or SST, is a set of object-oriented software components and software development tools for building sonar simulators -“artificial oceans” that sound like a real ocean as “heard” by an existing or proposed sonar system. SST-based simulators produce a digital representation of the predicted signal at a selected point in the receiver’s processing path (typically at each element or beam-former) for a given sonar and environment. The signal includes random fluctuations with controlled statistical properties. The SST is intended to enable a user (programmer) to build a wide variety of applications simply and quickly, with minimal duplication. Thus, the toolset must be highly flexible, modular, portable, reliable, efficient, and tolerant of change. To help achieve these attributes, the principles of object-oriented programming are used as the basis for a library of classes and objects. A class defines a data structure and associated operations; an object is an instance of a class structure containing a particular set of data. SST classes are implemented in C, using mechanisms similar to the X Windows Toolkit. SST objects are C structures initialized at compile time; they may be placed in libraries like subroutines, and configured into application programs at link time. Currently, the package includes models (classes) for several types of beam pattems, pulses, sound propagation, reverberation, scatterers, etc. One of the sound propagation models uses eigenray files produced by the Naval Underwater Systems Center’s Generic Sonar Model, using any of Generic’s sound propagation models. A simple program called REVGEN-SST, which generates a reverberation time series and writes it in a file, is intended as a starting point for userdesigned applications. The current release runs on VAXNMS, VAWNIX, PyramiWNIX, and Cray/CTSS systems.

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