Cooperative Transmission for Underwater Acoustic Communications

Underwater acoustic channels normally have low data rate, long propagation delay, severe multipath effect, and time varying fading. Cooperative transmission is a new wireless communication technique in which diversity gain is achieved by utilizing relay nodes as virtual antennae. In this paper, we investigate cooperative transmission techniques for underwater acoustic communications. First, we study the performance of several cooperative transmission schemes, originally designed for radio communications, in an underwater scenario. Second, by taking advantage of the low propagation speed of sound, we design a new wave cooperative transmission scheme. In this scheme, the relay nodes amplify the signal received from the source node, and then forward the signal immediately to the destination. The goal is to alter the multipath effect at the receiver. Third, we derive the performance upper bound for the proposed wave cooperative transmission scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed wave cooperative transmission has significant advantages over the traditional direct transmission and the existing cooperative transmission schemes originally designed for radio wireless networks. ©2008 IEEE

Cooperative underwater acoustic communications

This article presents a contemporary overview of underwater acoustic communication (UWAC) and investigates physical layer aspects on cooperative transmission techniques for future UWAC systems. Taking advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless transmission, cooperative communication realizes spatial diversity advantages in a distributed manner. The current literature on cooperative communication focuses on terrestrial wireless systems at radio frequencies with sporadic results on cooperative UWAC. In this article, we summarize initial results on cooperative UWAC and investigate the performance of a multicarrier cooperative UWAC considering the inherent unique characteristics of the underwater channel. Our simulation results demonstrate the superiority of cooperative UWAC systems over their point-to-point counterparts. © 1979-2012 IEEE

Federated Meta Learning Enhanced Acoustic Radio Cooperative Framework for Ocean of Things Underwater Acoustic Communications

Sixth-generation wireless communication (6G) will be an integrated architecture of "space, air, ground and sea". One of the most difficult part of this architecture is the underwater information acquisition which need to transmitt information cross the interface between water and air.In this senario, ocean of things (OoT) will play an important role, because it can serve as a hub connecting Internet of things (IoT) and Internet of underwater things (IoUT). OoT device not only can collect data through underwater methods, but also can utilize radio frequence over the air. For underwater communications, underwater acoustic communications (UWA COMMs) is the most effective way for OoT devices to exchange information, but it is always tormented by doppler shift and synchronization errors. In this paper, in order to overcome UWA tough conditions, a deep neural networks based receiver for underwater acoustic chirp communication, called C-DNN, is proposed. Moreover, to improve the performance of DL-model and solve the problem of model generalization, we also proposed a novel federated meta learning (FML) enhanced acoustic radio cooperative (ARC) framework, dubbed ARC/FML, to do transfer. Particularly, tractable expressions are derived for the convergence rate of FML in a wireless setting, accounting for effects from both scheduling ratio, local epoch and the data amount on a single node.From our analysis and simulation results, it is shown that, the proposed C-DNN can provide a better BER performance and lower complexity than classical matched filter (MF) in underwater acoustic communications scenario. The ARC/FML framework has good convergence under a variety of channels than federated learning (FL). In summary, the proposed ARC/FML for OoT is a promising scheme for information exchange across water and air

Acoustic based tactical control of underwater vehicles

Advances in command and control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) using acoustic communications are crucial to future Fleet objectives, particularly in Very Shallow Water Mine Countermeasures (VSW MCM). Understanding of the capability to redirect missions, provide relatively high rate downloads of mission information, and perform cooperative tracking for multi-vehicle systems is limited to some bounding data based on fixed node experiments. The main objectives of this dissertation were to investigate and demonstrate the capabilities of tactical acoustic control of a dynamic, operational underwater vehicle in the Very Shallow Water (VSW) and Shallow Water ocean environment. This necessarily required studies on the limitations of Acoustic Control and relatively High Data Rate Transfer when using commercial acoustic modems in underwater vehicles and investigation of their acoustic transmission characteristics. Comprehensive empirical evidence through field validation with the ARIES vehicle indicated that reduced ranges were required for successful acoustic communications in a realistic shallow water environment. A simulation was developed to demonstrate a solution for dealing with reduced range and conducting multi-vehicle behaviors for cooperative tracking and acoustic data transfer.http://archive.org/details/acousticbasedtac109459858Commander, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

AUV/ASC cooperative survey

In this paper we describe a solution to perform autonomous surveys taking advantage of a cooperative multivehicle setup. In the proposed configuration, an ASC provides –through an USBL- absolute positioning and communications to an AUV. Thus, by following the AUV with the surface vehicle we facilitate the reception of USBL measurements in the AUV regardless of the extent of the mission. This turns into an improved navigation on the AUV’s side, with the drift bounded thanks to the absolute measurements. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to maintain the ASC at a close distance and improve the navigation of the AUV. Moreover, the bathymetric maps built from the AUV data are consistent enough to enable the automatic detection of present targets and program further localized missions in the area.Peer Reviewe

Distributed space–time cooperative schemes for underwater acoustic communications

Author Posting. © IEEE, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of IEEE for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering 33 (2008): 489-50, doi:10.1109/JOE.2008.2005338.In resource limited, large scale underwater sensor networks, cooperative communication over multiple hops offers opportunities to save power. Intermediate nodes between source and destination act as cooperative relays. Herein, protocols coupled with space-time block code (STBC) strategies are proposed and analyzed for distributed cooperative communication. Amplify-and-forward-type protocols are considered, in which intermediate relays do not attempt to decode the information. The Alamouti-based cooperative scheme proposed by Hua (2003) for flat-fading channels is generalized to work in the presence of multipath, thus addressing a main characteristic of underwater acoustic channels. A time-reversal distributed space-time block code (TR-DSTBC) is proposed, which extends the dual-antenna TR-STBC (time-reversal space-time block code) approach from Lindskog and Paulraj (2000) to a cooperative communication scenario for signaling in multipath. It is first shown that, just as in the dual-antenna STBC case, TR along with the orthogonality of the DSTBC essentially allows for decoupling of the vector intersymbol interference (ISI) detection problem into separate scalar problems, and thus yields strong performance (compared with single-hop communication) and with substantially reduced complexity over nonorthogonal schemes. Furthermore, a performance analysis of the proposed scheme is carried out to provide insight on the performance gains, which are further confirmed via numerical results based on computer simulations and field data experiments

Joint Optimal Design for Outage Minimization in DF Relay-assisted Underwater Acoustic Networks

This letter minimizes outage probability in a single decode-and-forward (DF) relay-assisted underwater acoustic network (UAN) without direct source-to-destination link availability. Specifically, a joint global-optimal design for relay positioning and allocating power to source and relay is proposed. For analytical insights, a novel low-complexity tight approximation method is also presented. Selected numerical results validate the analysis and quantify the comparative gains achieved using optimal power allocation (PA) and relay placement (RP) strategies.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; accepted to IEEE Communications Letters 201