Software-Defined Distributed SIMO System for Underwater Communication

Wide-ranging applications for underwater acoustic communication are attracting attention. However, the challenges of underwater acoustic communications make it necessary to advance communication techniques significantly. Underwater networks with wider coverage areas and more reliable communication links may be possible with the distributed deployment of several reception nodes. Using Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) systems, power, and bandwidth resources can be utilized effectively without compromising spectral efficiency. In this work, we propose a communication system that employs software-defined distributed SIMO networking to exploit the spatial diversity of multiple receiver nodes for high data rates and reliable communication. To take advantage of spatial diversity, we develop and implement a software-defined architecture for the maximal-ratio combining receiver. Then, we conduct a thorough experimental evaluation in ocean environments for various subcarrier bandwidths and constellations using three distributed receivers. Our results show that our proposed distributed SIMO system, for both 1x2 and 1x3 settings, outperforms individual receiver modems in terms of bit error rate (BER) performance by 95.20% and 99.57%, respectively.