Proc. IEEE OCEANS, September 20-23, 2010, Seattle, Washington USA, accepted.

Wideband Monopulse Spatial Filtering for Large Array Receivers for Reverberant Underwater Communication Channels

Karl F. Nieman, Kenneth A. Perrine, Keith H. Lent, Terry L. Henderson, Terry J. Brudner and Brian L. Evans

Advanced Technology Laboratory, Applied Research Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 USA
nieman@arlut.utexas.edu - perrine@arlut.utexas.edu - lent@arlut.utexas.edu - henderson@arlut.utexas.edu - brudner@arlut.utexas.edu - bevans@ece.utexas.edu

Paper - Slides

Companion papers were presented at Asilomar 2010 and SiPS 2010.

Abstract

Underwater acoustic communication (ACOMMS) is critical for many applications including marine science, oceanographic exploration, offshore surveying/drilling, and military uses. ACOMMS data rates are usually limited by multiple propagation paths with different time delays and Doppler characteristics. It is often difficult to coherently recombine all paths, especially in shallow water, leaving incoherent paths that interfere with the receiver.

One way to suppress unwanted paths is with a directional receiving array. Indeed, many existing large, directional acoustic arrays could be used as ACOMMS receivers. In a number of these arrays, wideband monopulse outputs could be made available. These directional beam outputs, in monopulse pairs, can selectively suppress, or even null, offending multipath when combined with a simple scalar weight. Using an experimental system, we show how a relatively short equalizer, using as inputs the wideband monopulse beam outputs of a large array, can form the backbone of an ACOMMS system that performs effectively in a multipath-limited environment. Our contributions include

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Last Updated 03/21/14.