Receiver design for differential phase-shift keying underwater acoustic communication

This paper presents constructing transmitter and receiver by using a direct sequence spread spectrum techniques to DPSK (Differential Phase-Shift Keying) scheme in underwater acoustic communication. Since DPSK signal can be demodulated if the receiver knows only the phase difference between the adjacent bits, DPSK receiver structure has the advantage of being simplified. In the conventional receiver, two adjacent symbols of transmitted signal before despread are passed to the transition correlator that detects data by comparing maximum correlation outputs. At this time, the error for maximum value of the correlator output may increase because of low SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) or high Doppler shift frequency according to the underwater channel. In this paper, we propose a method for accurate detection result using the width as well as the magnitude among outputs produced by the correlator. The performances of the proposed method was evaluated by simulation and lake trial data.