Design of a Robust Underwater Acoustic Communication System over Multipath Fading Channels

Due to the surface and bottom constraints of the underwater acoustic channel (UAC) in shallow waters, multipath fading occurs and causes degradation of the signal for the UAC system. To overcome these problems, a robust underwater acoustic communication system was designed over multipath fading channels by employing both decision feedback equalization with the RLS algorithm and convolutional coding with interleaving+shuffling block data sequence. The dual use of these two methods simultaneously can reduce the intersymbol interference (ISI) and the adjacent bit and burst errors. The system will retransmit the same signal if the system fails to estimate the channel due to severe multipath fading. To verify the performance of the system, the transmission of an image was tested using a 524,288bit gray-scaled image through the multipath fading channel. The test results showed that the number of bit errors was reduced from 86,824 to 5,106 when the reference SNR was 12 dB.