Modeling of acoustic propagation channel in underwater wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Acoustic communication in the underwater wireless sensor network has many challenges due to the limited bandwidth and propagation loss and has attracted many researchers in the past decade. The diversity of an underwater acoustic channel due to time-variant nature of underwater channel can cause the divergence in the signal strength and can add some great impact on the accomplishment of the wireless communication systems. A channel model plays a vital role to classify the consummation and understanding of the system. In underwater acoustic channels, shallow water is one of the challenging medium to deal with due to the time varying multipath and Doppler Effect. Some deep underwater channels are very simplified and do not consider the multipath and fading effect in the underwater. In this paper we have presented a new underwater acoustic channel model which is based on ray acoustics including both time variability and multipath effects for underwater acoustic communication dealing with both problems.