| A novel method of achieving stable high-speed underwater acoustic communication with a fairly low-complexity of implementation is proposed. The proposed approach is to split the space and time processing into two separate sub-optimal processes. As a result, processing complexity is significantly reduced and the instabilities associated with large tap vectors at large time-frequency spread products are reduced. The proposed space-time signal processing method utilizes a different beamformer optimization strategy compared to the time domain optimization strategy. This allows to separately adjust the adaptation parameters for the spatial and temporal characteristics of the signal, which have vastly different requirements. The time domain signal is subject to variations in phase that require rapid filter updates whereas the directional characteristics of the signal do not vary appreciably over the message length and do not require a rapid adaptation response. The proposed method allows for high-speed underwater acoustic communication in very shallow water using coherent modulation techniques, and offers a series of unique features: significant reduction of the signal-to-noise and interference ratio (SNIR), improvement of the bandwidth efficiency by reduction of the forward-error coding redundancy requirements, real-time evaluation of the time-spread by Doppler spread product (BL) and channel stability estimate. Experimental results demonstrate that stable acoustic communication can be achieved at rates of 32000 bits per second at a distance of 3 km, in 40 feet of water and in sea-state 2 conditions. Fast and slow fading properties of the channel are measured, as the BL product can vary by a decade in 116 ms, and by two decades within minutes, from 0.001 to 0.1. The real-time analysis shows a strong correlation between time spread, Doppler spread, spatial coherence of the acoustic channel and communication performance. Overall, this research provides more scientific and experimental ground to understand the limitations of multi-channel adaptive receiver techniques in terms of stability, hardware requirements and channel tracking capability. |
