Design and analysis of a high-rate acoustic link for underwater video transmission

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-75).A high bit rate acoustic link for underwater video transmission is examined. Currently, encoding standards support video transmission at bit rates as low as 64 kbps. While this rate is still above the limit of commercially available acoustic modems, prototype acoustic modems based on phase coherent modulation/detection have demonstrated successful transmission at 30 kbps over a deep water channel. The key to bridging the remaining gap between the bit-rate needed for video transmission and that supported by the acoustic channel lies in two approaches: use of efficient image/video compression algorithms and use of high-level bandwidth-efficient modulation methods. An experimental system, based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) and Huffman entropy coding for image compression, and variable rate M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) was implemented. Phase-coherent equalization is accomplished by joint operation of a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) and a second order phase locked loop (PLL). System performance is demonstrated experimentally, using transmission rate of 25000 symbols/sec at a carrier frequency of 75 kHz over a 10 m vertical path.(cont.) Excellent results were obtained, thus demonstrating bit rates as high as 150 kbps, which are sufficient for real-time transmission of compressed video. As an alternative to conventional QAM signaling, whose high-level constellations are sensitive to phase distortions induced by the channel, M-ary differential amplitude and phase shift keying (DAPSK) was used. DAPSK does not require explicit carrier phase synchronization at the receiver, but instead relies on simple differentially coherent detection. Receiver processing includes a linear equalizer whose coefficients are adjusted using a modified linear least square (LMS) algorithm. Simulation results confirm good performance of the differentially coherent equalization scheme employed.by Konstantinos Pelekanakis.S.M

Harvesting time-frequency-space diversity with coded modulation for underwater acoustic communications

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 172-180).The goal of this thesis is to design a low-complexity, high data-rate acoustic communications system with robust performance under various channel conditions. The need for robust performance emerges because underwater acoustic (UWA) channels have time-varying statistics, thus a coded modulation scheme optimally designed for a specific channel model will be suboptimal when the channel statistics change. A robust approach should use a coded modulation scheme that provides good performance in both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels (and, consequently in the Rice fading channel, an intermediate channel model between the latter two). Hence, high data-rate coded modulation schemes should exhibit both large free Euclidean and Hamming distances. In addition, coded modulation is regarded as a way to achieve time diversity over interleaved flat fading channels. UWA channels offer additional diversity gains in both frequency and space; therefore a system that exploits diversity in all three domains is highly desirable. Two systems with the same bit-rate and complexity but different free Euclidean and Hamming distances are designed and compared. The first system combines Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM) based on an 8-PSK signal set, symbol interleaving and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). The second system combines bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM), based on a convolutional code and a 16-QAM signal set, with OFDM.(cont.) Both systems are combined with specific space-time block codes (STBC) when two or three transmit antennas are used. Moreover, pilot-symbol-aided channel estimation is performed by using a robust 2-D Wiener filter, which copes with channel model mismatch by employing appropriate time and frequency correlation functions. The following result was obtained by testing the aforementioned systems using both simulated and experimental data from RACE '08: the BICM scheme performs better when the UWA channel exhibits limited spatial diversity. This result implies that coded modulation schemes emphasizing higher Hamming distances are preferred when there is no option for many receive/transmit hydrophones. The TCM scheme, on the other hand, becomes a better choice when the UWA channel demonstrates a high spatial diversity order. This result implies that coded modulation schemes emphasizing higher free Euclidean distances are preferred when multiple receive/transmit hydrophones are deployed.by Konstantinos Pelekanakis.Ph.D

Performance Evaluation of SNR Prediction Schemes in Acoustic Communications using Variable-Rate Modulation

Variable-Rate Modulation (VRM) is a technique well known in wireless radio to potentially enhance the performance of digital transmissions over links of time-varying quality. VRM usually relies on feedback from the receiver in order to perform a timely adaptation of the modulation scheme in use. As underwater communications are subject to round-trip delays longer than the channel coherence time, this feedback may not be sufficiently representative of the channel quality at the time of the next transmission. Therefore, it may be more convenient to resort to a predictive processing of previous feedback on channel quality. In this paper, we explore the capability of several predictive techniques such as linear predictive filters, Kalman filters, Markov models as well as some heuristic schemes to infer future channel Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) values based on current and past SNR samples, with the ultimate objective of reducing the probability of outage events (defined as the choice of a modulation scheme not supported by the current SNR). The SNR traces used in our evaluation are taken from real experiments