Shallow water acoustic channel modeling with adaptive communications

Abstract

The underwater acoustic channel is known to be severely bandwidth limited due to sound attenuation by sea water, and interaction with the ocean surface and bottom. Yet, shallow water acoustic channels at high frequencies are little understood, particularly in shallow water environments, and hence the quest for achieving a viable adaptive communication solution has been a challenge that perplexed scientists for a long time. In this abstract, we first take Hodson River estuary as an example to investigate the characterizations of shallow water environments, which mainly comprises the evaluation of key channel parameters such as the scattering function, Doppler shift, coherent bandwidth, coherent time, 2D (i.e., Time-Frequency) time-variant channel impulse response (CIR). The study will also cover channel fading statistics, and water conditions that affect the CIR (e.g., bubble plumes and mddium inhomogeneities). Finally, the models developed will be used to evaluate the achievable performance of channel estimation and adaptive communication systems in shallow water acoustic media.