Paillet, E.

Open Marine Archive

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RESEARCH INTO THE FEASIBILITY OF HIGH BANDWIDTH UNDERWATER 
DATA TRANSMISSION 
Paillet Eric  
Vakgroep Embedded, Datacommunicatie, Departement IWT, Karel de Grote Hogeschool 
Salesianenlaan 30, B-2660 Hoboken, Belgium 
Currently high bandwidth electronic data communication in a submarine environment is 
usually performed by means of cables. This poses practical problems for dynamic 
applications like video links with divers and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV’s). 
Cables can get tangled or swept away by water currents. 
As such research into fast wireless communications has great merit. This research 
focuses on novel techniques to achieve data rates sufficient to carry digital video data 
over a distance of about a kilometre. 
The main research focus is on the application of Orthogonal Frequency Division 
Modulation (OFDM) on an acoustic underwater link and application of MPEG-4 or 
H.264 coding on this channel to achieve sufficient image quality. 
The research is supported by empirical experiments with a mobile test rig and computer 
simulations. The final goal is to prove the feasibility of a video communication system 
for underwater applications at a reasonable technical price. 
References 
Pelekanakis C., M. Stojanovic and L. Freitag. 2003. High rate acoustic link for underwater 
video transmission. Proc. IEEE OCEANS'03 Conference, San Diego, CA, September 2003. 
Nissen I. 2005. Pilot-based OFDM-systems for underwater communication applications. Turkish 
International Conference on Acoustics.  
 
 


Research into the feasibility of high bandwidth underwater data transmission

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