Underwater Acoustic Communications: Design Considerations on the Physical Layer

Acoustic propagation is characterized by three major factors: attenuation that depends on the signal frequency, multipath propagation, and low speed of sound (1500 m/s). The channel has a sparse impulse response, where each physical path acts as a time-varying low-pass filter, and motion introduces additional Doppler spreading and shifting. Because propagation is best supported at low frequencies, acoustic communication systems are inherently wideband. The way in which these facts influence the design of signal processing methods is considered for single-carrier and multi-carrier systems. Moreover, the facts that the available bandwidth and transmission power depend heavily on the distance, and that channel latency is high, bear important implications on the design of network architectures and related protocols.