Performance Enhancement of Multiuser Passive Time Reversal Communication Based on Space-Time Block Coding

Reliable,with high data rate,acoustic communication in time-varying,multipath shallow water environment is a hot research topic recently.Passive time reversal communication has shown promising results in improvement of the system performance.In multiuser environment,the system performance is significantly degraded due to the interference among different users.Passive time reversal can reduce such interference by minimizing the cross-correlated version of channel impulse response among users,which can be realized by the well-separated users in depth.But this method also has its shortcomings,even with the absence of relative motion,the minimization sometimes may be impossible because of the time-varying environment.Therefore in order to avoid the limitation of minimizing the cross-correlated channel function,an approach of passive time reversal based on space-time block coding (STBC) is presented in this paper.In addition,a single channel equalizer is used as a post processing technique to reduce the residual symbol interference.Experimental results at 13 kHz with 2 kHz bandwidth demonstrate that this method has better performance to decrease bit error rate and improve signal to noise ratio,compared with passive time reversal alone or passive time reversal combined with equalization.