Measurement-based Underwater Acoustic Physical Layer Simulation

Simulation is important in the study of underwater networking because of the difficulty and expense of performing experiments. Underwater acoustic propagation is influenced by a wide variety of environmental factors, rendering analytic models complex, inaccurate, or both. Therefore, simulations based on models are of uncertain utility. In contrast, this simulator uses measured impulse response, CTD, noise, and transmission loss data in an effort to more realistically simulate the channel. The application layer generates data packets whose modulated waveforms are "mixed" with the channel's properties and sent to a receiver implemented fully in software, where the simulated bit error rate (BER) is measured. For a shallow time-invariant test channel, this process results in a simulated BER that is, on average, within 3.34% of the true BER.