Multipath combining method for frequency shift keying underwater communications mimicking dolphin whistle

This paper proposes a dolphin whistle mimicking underwater communication method using FSK (Frequency Shift Keying) and method to improve BER (Bit Error Rate) performance by using multipath gain combining. The proposed method divides whistle sound into short time intervals and transmits FSK modulated signal that ensures orthogonality of the symbol. Multipath gain can be obtained by using characteristic of mimicked signal frequency that varies with time. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, computer simulations and lake experiments were conducted. Computer simulation results show that an additional multipath gain is obtained by multipath. From lake experiments, when symbol length is 20 msec and modulation band is 900 Hz, the proposed FSK method with multipath combining gain obtains BER of 0.002, which is better than CSS (Chirp Spread Spectrum) with BER of 0.185. he proposed based on FSK method has higher imitation degree than the CSS method by analyzing mean cross-correlation value in the time - frequency domain of the imitated signal and actual whistle signal.