Modeling Of A Shallow Water Acoustic Communication Channel

Abstract

In these last years, many studies have focalized on the design of reliable underwater acoustic communication systems. However, the ocean acoustic communication channel exhibits strong amplitude and phase fluctuations and the phenomena of diffraction, refraction and reflection. Due to the complexity of the environment, the motions of transducers, sea surface, etc., the underwater acoustic signals exhibit random temporal and spatial frequency fluctuations in both amplitude and phase. Therefore, it is very important to model a so complex channel. Acoustic propagation is characterized by three major factors: attenuation that increases with signal frequency, time-varying multipath propagation, and low speed of sound (1500 m/s). The background noise, although often characterized as Gaussian, is not white, but has a decaying power spectral density. The channel capacity depends on the distance and may be extremely limited. In this paper, we propose a new multipath channel model for shallow underwater acoustic communications. In particular, our model takes into account the effects due to spreading loss, scattering and reflections.