Ambient Noise in Warm Shallow Waters: A Communications Perspective

In warm shallow waters, the ambient noise process is found to be impulsive. This phenomenon is attributed to the collective snaps created by snapping shrimp colonies inhabiting such regions. Each snap essentially creates a pressure wave, and the resulting noise process dominates the acoustic spectrum at medium-to-high frequencies. Consequently, if not addressed, snapping shrimp noise is severely detrimental to the performance of an acoustic communication system operating nearby. This article briefly summarizes and addresses the problems faced during acoustic communication in snapping shrimp noise. We discuss how the noise process can be characterized by a certain statistical model based on the symmetric a-stable (SaS) family of distributions. Within the framework of this model, we highlight problems and the corresponding solutions faced in various stages of digital communication system design. Both single and multicarrier systems are commented on. The resulting schemes are robust to outliers and offer excellent error performance in comparison to conventional methods in impulsive noise.