Geometric Multi-path Avoiding Approach for Adaptive Acoustic Underwater Communications

Long multi-path delays actively interfere with the underwater communication of autonomous underwater vehicles, sensor nodes, and other things of underwater. We propose a fast adaptive and straightforward geometrical multi-path avoidance approach. We compensate for the side effect of multi-path interference and reflections with available sensor data for adaptive position and environment-specific modem settings. We show with exemplary tests via a model-based modem and 25 underwater channel scenarios that we can minimize the impact of interferences by multiple delayed data signals based on reflections. Furthermore, we increase the goodput up to 2.7 times and with a 56.4 % higher decoding rate compared to the static settings, on average.