Efficient Real Time Image Transmission Over Underwater Acoustic mmWave Channel

Owing to the underwater (UW) acoustic channel characteristic (i.e. low bandwidth and the multipath spreading) the real time multimedia (i.e. image and video) transmission over underwater acoustic (UWA) channel is a very tough task. Therefore, in this paper, an acoustic millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication channel is proposed to replace the conventional UWA channel. Where, the high bandwidth of acoustic mmWave is exploited to improve the UW communication throughput (megabit/sec). Moreover, the set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) coder is used as an efficient source coder to effectively support the real-time underwater image transmission over the acoustic mmWave channel. However, a real measured UWA channel data are used in this paper to test the performances of the mmWave underwater communication. The data are collected from the South China Sea to demonstrate the acoustic mmWave underwater communication channel to be used to transmitting a high efficient real-time underwater image. The simulation results indicate the efficiency of multimedia communication over the UW acoustic mmWave channel. However, UW acoustic mmWave communication improves the peak signals-to-noise ratio (PSNR) performance of the UW multimedia transmission.