Real-time Video Transmission through Underwater MIMO Acoustic Communication Channels

Video transmission requires 100 kbps - 500 kbps channel capacity which presents tremendous challenges over underwater acoustic wireless channels. This paper implements a prototype of a 4-by-4 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) acoustic transmitter and receiver at the carrier frequency of 200 kHz, and achieves an information data rate of 100 kbps. The transmitter prototype is capable of real-time video transmission at 2 - 8 frames per second using H.264 video compression. The receiver uses a multi-core CPU for base-band processing and can achieve real-time recovery of transmitted videos with 2 frames per second.