A Geometry-Based Underwater Acoustic Channel Model for Time Reversal Acoustic Communication

Abstract

High data rate is a necessity in data transmission on the underwater acoustic channel, such as the transmission of large data packets and real-time data transmission from underwater sensors. However, the underwater acoustic ((UWA) channel exhibits phase fluctuations and strong amplitudes as well as diffraction, refraction and reflection phenomena. These factors are obstacles to obtaining high-speed, reliable and long-range underwater acoustic communication. The effects of multipath interference due to surface reflections and the ocean floor are major problems in UWA communication. Therefore, the underwater acoustic channel modeling is required. In this paper, a simple but effective geometry-based channel modeling for time reversal communication is proposed. The influence of transmitter and receiver height at varying distances is analyzed. This paper also presents the performance analysis of time reversal and OFDM communication where their collaboration shows superior performance. The simulation result shows that TR-OFDM is able to achieve a BER value of less than 0.001 on SNR above 10 dB.