ANALYSIS AND STUDY OF DOPPLER SPREAD CHANNELS FOR UNDERWATER ACOUSTICS COMMUNICATION

Underwater acoustic channels are characterized by time-varying and multi-path features. Underwater experiments conducted to test communication systems are expensive. Simulation techniques that model underwater acoustic signal in a realistic sense, which is still an open issue, are useful for verification of new communication techniques before experiments and for comparison of different systems in the same scenario. In this paper, we propose a new approach to model the underwater acoustic channel for communication. This approach is unified for any kind of movements in any scenario in the sense that the time varying channel is introduced according to the movements. The viability of this approach is evaluated by modeling signal of real experiment in both shallow water and deep water scenarios. It is shown that the numerical results in simulation are well matched to those in the experiments from the aspects of modeling channel Doppler spread, the signal for matched field localization, and the effect of motion fluctuations.