Accessibility statement

Development of real-time UWA communication modem

Underwater communications is a challenging area of research. Acoustic communications is considered to be the most practical way of data transmission underwater. However, such phenomena as the Doppler effect and multipath propagation introduce severe distortions in the transmitted signals. These distortions should be corrected before decoding of the transmitted data from the received signal.

This research aims at designing a real-time acoustic communication modem exploiting novel signal processing techniques, developed at York, that are capable of estimating and equalizing  the multipath UWA channel with Doppler distortions.  Firstly, a C-code will be developed and optimised on a PC, which implements an acoustic modem, currently available in Matlab. Multiple simulations will be performed to assess the performance of the modem and optimize signal processing algorithms in the modem. This optimisation will target improved detection performance of the modem. The C-code will then be transferred into a DSP Evaluation Board to provide the real-time functionality. Further optimisation of the code will be done to reduce the computational load of the modem design. The developed modem will be tested in the air (using loudspeaker and microphone as transducer and receiver) and in a real lake and/or sea experiments.

 

Members

  • Yingxie Tian
  • Yuriy Zakharov
  • Benjamin Henson

Funding

  • Self-funded

Dates

  • Oct 2018 – Sep 2021

Research