A channel parameter-based weighting method for performance improvement of underwater acoustic communication system using single vector sensor

Abstract

An acoustic vector sensor can simultaneously receive vector quantities, such as particle velocity and acceleration, as well as acoustic pressure at one location, and thus it can be used as a single input multiple output receiver in underwater acoustic communication systems. On the other hand, vector signals received by a single vector sensor have different channel characteristics due to the azimuth angle between the source and receiver and the difference in propagation angle of multipath in each component, producing different communication performances. In this paper, we propose a channel parameter-based weighting method to improve the performance of an acoustic communication system using a single vector sensor. To verify the proposed method, we used communication data collected from the experiment conducted during the KOREX-17 (Korea Reverberation Experiment). For communication demodulation, block-based time reversal technique which is robust against time-varying channels were utilized. Finally, the communication results showed that the effectiveness of the channel parameter-based weighting method for the underwater communication system using a single vector sensor was verified.