Autoencoder-based signal modulation and demodulation method for sonobuoy signal transmission and reception

Sonobuoy is a disposable device that collects underwater acoustic information and is designed to transmit signals collected in a particular area to nearby aircraft or ships and sink to the seabed upon completion of its mission. In a conventional sonobouy signal transmission and reception system, collected signals are modulated and transmitted using techniques such as frequency division modulation or Gaussian frequency shift keying, and received and demodulated by an aircraft or a ship. However, this method has the disadvantage of the large amount of information to be transmitted and low security due to relatively simple modulation and demodulation methods. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method that uses an autoencoder to encode a transmission signal into a low-dimensional latent vector to transmit the latent vector to an aircraft or ship and decode the received latent vector to improve signal security and to reduce the amount of transmission information by approximately a factor of a hundred compared to the conventional method. As a result of confirming the sample spectrogram reconstructed by the proposed method through simulation, it was confirmed that the original signal could be restored from a low-dimensional latent vector.