A differential chaos-shift keying scheme based on hybrid system for underwater acoustic communication

Exploration and development of the ocean relies on underwater acoustic communication. However, the intrinsic characteristics of the underwater channel require that the communication system can cope with several physical constraints, such as more serious multipath propagation, limited frequency band, complex ambient noises, interference, time-varying characteristics and significant Doppler frequency shift. These features restrict the development of low Bit Error Rate (BER) underwater acoustic communication. In this paper, we propose a novel differential chaos shift keying (DCSK) scheme based on a hybrid chaotic system to obtain a better BER performance in underwater acoustic channels. In this scheme, the chaotic carrier is generated by a hybrid system rather than the traditional chaotic map. A corresponding match filter is used to decrease the effect of ambient noises at the receiver end. Compared with some existing methods, the BER performance of the proposed scheme is better.