Underwater Acoustic Communication Using Nonlinear Chirp Signal

Abstract

This paper presents an underwater acoustic communication with nonlinear chirp modulation. The information is carried by the carrier amplitude, frequency or phase in the most common underwater acoustic communications. However, the proposed method includes the information within frequency variation of carrier wave for a symbol. Especially, as carrier wave the hyperbolic frequency modulated signal, one of the nonlinear chirp signal, is used and it is robust in the Doppler channel. The proposed method was analyzed and compared to conventional method by simulation. When the doppler shift existed, the error probability of the proposed method is reduced by 5~12 % than conventional method with linear frequency modulated signal. Sea trial was performed to analyze the performance of the proposed method.