UNDERWATER COMMUNICATIONS WITH ACOUSTIC STEGANOGRAPHY: RECOVERY ANALYSIS AND MODELING

In the modern warfare environment, communication is a cornerstone of combat competence. However, the increasing threat of communications-denied environments highlights the need for communications systems with low probability of intercept and detection. This is doubly true in the subsurface environment, where communications and sonar systems can reveal the tactical location of platforms and capabilities, subverting their covert mission set. A steganographic communication scheme that leverages existing technologies and unexpected data carriers is a feasible means of increasing assurance of communications, even in denied environments. This research works toward a covert communication system by determining and comparing novel symbol recovery schemes to extract data from a signal transmitted under a steganographic technique and interfered with by a simulated underwater acoustic channel. We apply techniques for reliably extracting imperceptible information from unremarkable acoustic events robust to the variability of the hostile operating environment. The system is evaluated based on performance metrics, such as transmission rate and bit error rate, and we show that our scheme is sufficient to conduct covert communications through acoustic transmissions, though we do not solve the problems of synchronization or equalization.Lieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Kalman Filter-Based Chip Differential Blind Adaptive Multiuser Detection for Variably Mobile Asynchronous Underwater Multiuser Communications

To mitigate the inter-symbol interference (ISI), multiple access interference (MAI) and the effect of different Doppler shifts within a data package incurred in variably mobile asynchronous underwater multiuser communications (VMAUMC), a Kalman filter-based chip differential blind adaptive multiuser detection (D-KF-BAMUD) algorithm is proposed in this paper. The Kalman filter-based blind adaptive multiuser detection (KF-BAMUD) algorithm has been adopted to combat ISI and MAI in the scenario of static users, and underwater and under-ice multiuser communication experiments have been carried out to verify the effectiveness of the KF-BAMUD algorithm. To tackle the more challenging VMAUMC, a differential modulation and demodulation technique operating at the chip level is proposed to reduce the impact of Doppler shift residues after the Doppler compensation with an average Doppler frequency offset within each data package. The technique is combined with KF-BAMUD algorithm, leading to D-KF-BAMUD algorithm, which is able to effectively handle ISI, MAI and the effect of Doppler shift residues simultaneously in VMAUMC. This paper reports our experiments on VMAUMC carried out in Songhua River in April 2016 (7 users, data rate 7.87bit/s, up to 2m/s variably relative velocity in each data package, and horizontal distance 200m shallow-water channel between transducer and hydrophone), and the encouraging experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system and the D-KF-BAMUD algorithm