Long-range underwater acoustic communication of M-eyry spread spectrum with cyclic prefix

Abstract

The Spread Spectrum is an effective transmission method for complex channels in underwater acoustic (UWA) communication because of the high correlation of pseudo-random noise (PN) sequence. In particular, the spread spectrum method is effective in an environment with a low signal-to-noise ratio. The bandwidth of UWA communication channel is limited due to the fact that sound wave attenuation in water is positively associated with frequency. The limited bandwidth directly leads to the low data rate of conventional direct-sequence spread spectrum UWA communication. M-ary spread spectrum (MSS) schemes using multiple orthogonal PN sequences were proposed as a solution to this problem. However, even in the MSS method, the performance may be limited by the delay spread characteristics in the multipath propagation channels. We propose a more robust communication method in the UWA channel by including Cyclic Prefix (CP) to achieve a more robust performance in the multipath channel. In the proposed method, a CP is inserted for every symbol. In the 160 km long-range UWA communication experiment conducted in the East Sea, the proposed method showed more reliable results than the conventional MSS method. [Work supported by the Agency for Defense Development, South Korea, Grant No. UD200010DD.]