Application of Spatial Modulation to the Underwater Acoustic Communication Component of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Networks

摘要

There have been two fundamental advances in underwater acoustic communication in the last two decades. The first occurred in the early 1980's with the introduction of digital signaling techniques 1. That facilitated both error correction and reverberation mitigation. The second advance has been the successful application of coherent signaling techniques 2. That facilitated dramatic improvements in bandwidth efficiency and, hence, data rates. Since the introduction of coherent systems in the early 1990's, however, performance gains have been moderate and mostly attributed to important but largely technical algorithm improvements 3. Spatial modulation offers the hope of yet another fundamental advance in performance by both enabling higher data rates and offering a strategy for improving performance in intersymbol interference (ISI) limited channels. The research conducted in this program seeks to define both the potential for spatial modulation in U.S. Navy underwater communication systems and develop practical prototypes suitable to meet U.S. Navy needs.