Impact of vector sensor on underwater acoustic communications system

Abstract

The use of vector sensors as receivers for underwater acoustic communications systems is gaining popularity. It has become important to obtain performance measures for such communication systems to quantify their efficacy. The fundamental advantage of using a vector sensor as a receiver is that a single sensor is able to provide diversity gains offered by multiple input, multiple output systems. In a recent work, a novel framework for evaluating capacity of underwater channel was proposed. The approach is based on modelling the channel as a set of paths along which the signal arrives at the receiver with different angles of arrival. Here, the authors build on that framework to provide a bound on the achievable capacity of such a system. The analytical bounds have been compared against simulation results for a vector sensor-based single input, multiple output underwater communications system. The channel parameters are modelled by analysing the statistics generated with Bellhop simulation tool. This representation of the channel is flexible and allows for characterising channels at different geographical locations and at different time instances. This characterisation in terms of channel parameters enables the computing of the performance measure (channel capacity bound) for different geographical locations.