Combined spatial diversity and time equalization for broadband multiple channel underwater acoustic communications

High data rate acoustic communications become feasible with the use of communication systems that operate at high frequency. The high frequency acoustic transmission in shallow water endures severe distortion as a result of the extensive intersymbol interference and Doppler shift, caused by the time variable multipath nature of the channel. In this research a Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) acoustic communication system is developed to improve the reliability of the high data rate communications at short range in the shallow water acoustic channel. The proposed SIMO communication system operates at very high frequency and combines spatial diversity and decision feedback equalizer in a multilevel adaptive configuration. The first configuration performs selective combining on the equalized signals from multiple receivers and generates quality feedback parameter for the next level of combining. The second configuration implements a form of turbo equalization to evaluate the individual receivers using the feedback parameters as decision symbols. The improved signals from individual receivers are used in the next iteration of selective combining. Multiple iterations are used to achieve optimal estimate of the received signal.;The multilevel adaptive configuration is evaluated on experimental and simulated data using SIMO system with three, four and five receivers. The simulation channel model developed for this research is based on experimental channel and Rician fading channel model. The performance of the channel is evaluated in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and Signal-to-Noise-and-Interference Ratio (SNIR). Using experimental data with non-zero BER, multilevel adaptive spatial diversity can achieve BER of 0 % and SNIR gain of 3 dB. The simulation results show that the average BER and SNIR after multilevel combining improve dramatically compared to the single receiver, even in case of extremely high BER of individual received signals. The results demonstrate the ability of the proposed multilevel adaptive combining approach to significantly improve the performance of the shallow water acoustic channel, while preserving the same transmission power and channel bandwidth.