Underwater acoustic communication performance in reverberant water tank

Underwater acoustic wave in shallow water is propagated through multipath that has a large delay spread causing Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) and these characteristics deteriorate the performance in the communication system. In order to analyze the communication performance and investigate the correlation with multipath delay spread in a reverberant environment, an underwater acoustic communication experiment using Binary Phase-Shift Keying (BPSK) signals with symbol rates from 100 sym/s to 8000 sym/s was conducted in a 5 x 5 x 5 m(3) water tank. The acoustic channels in a well-controlled tank environment had the characteristics of dense multipath delay spread due to multiple reflections from the interfaces and walls within the tank and showed the maximum excess delay of 40 ms or less, and the Root Mean Squared (RMS) delay spread of 8 ms or less. In this paper, the performances of Bit Error Rate (BER) and output Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) were analyzed using four types of communication demodulation techniques. And the parameter, Symbol interval to Delay spread Ratio in reverberant environment (SDRrev), which is the ratio of symbol interval to RMS delay spread in the reverberant environment is defined. Finally, the SDRrev was compared to the BER and the output SNR. The results present the reference symbol rate in which high communication performance can be guaranteed.