A frequency-modulated-carrier digital communication technique for multipath underwater acoustic channels

Along with interferences, multipath propagation and, in particular, its instability in shallow sea is the main obstacle to increasing the digital data transfer rate in underwater acoustic communication systems. Given these conditions, the use of simple waveforms, for which the product of bandwidth by the length of the processing interval is close to unity, makes testing the quality of the communication channel much more difficult and strongly limits the possibilities of devices that compensate for current waveform distortions, such as, for example, equalizers. In multipath channels with random parameters, various complex waveforms with different spectrum spreading techniques had been used for years. Complex waveforms with a large base (time-bandwidth product) offer advantages in efficiently suppressing narrowband interferences and providing asynchronous multiple-access communications. This paper proposes a new complex waveform, which uses sequences of chirp pulses. On receiving, this waveform can be divided into individual responses through converting the delays of these individual responses to frequency offsets. After a special frequency conversion of the received signal, the multipath responses are separated in the frequency domain by conventional band-pass filtering. (C) 2004 MAIK "Nauka/Interperiodica".