High-rate synthetic aperture communications in shallow water.

Time reversal communication exploits spatial diversity to achieve spatial and temporal focusing in complex ocean environments. Spatial diversity can be provided easily by a vertical array in a waveguide. Alternatively, spatial diversity can be obtained from a virtual horizontal array generated by two elements, a transmitter and a receiver, due to relative motion between them, referred to as a synthetic aperture. This paper presents coherent synthetic aperture communication results from at-sea experiments conducted in two different frequency bands: (1) 2-4 kHz and (2) 8-20 kHz. Case (1) employs binary-phase shift-keying modulation, while case (2) involves up to eight-phase shift keying modulation with a data rate of 30 kbits/s divided by the number of transmissions (diversity) to be accumulated. The receiver utilizes time reversal diversity combining followed by a single channel equalizer, with frequent channel updates to accommodate the time-varying channel due to coupling of space and time in the presence of motion. Two to five consecutive transmissions from a source moving at 4 kts over 3-6 km range in shallow water are combined successfully after Doppler compensation, confirming the feasibility of coherent synthetic aperture communications using time reversal.

High-frequency acoustic communications achieving high bandwidth efficiency.

A recent communications experiment was conducted in a shallow water environment at high-frequency permitting the use of a large bandwidth (11-19 kHz). This paper investigates the communication performance versus various symbol rates (or bandwidths) in terms of output signal-to-noise ratio with an assortment of constellations, illustrating a trade-off between performance and data rate. A high bandwidth efficiency of 4 bits/s Hz is demonstrated using 32 quadrature amplitude modulation with a data rate of 31.25 kbits/s over a 2.2-km range.

Passive reverberation nulling for target enhancement.

Echo-to-reverberation enhancement previously has been demonstrated using time reversal focusing when knowledge of the channel response between a target and the source array elements is available. In the absence of this knowledge, direct focusing is not possible. However, active reverberation nulling still is feasible given observations of reverberation from conventional source array transmissions. For a given range of interest, the response between the source array elements and the dominant sources of boundary reverberation is provided by the corresponding reverberation from this range. Thus, an active transmission can be projected from the source array which minimizes the energy interacting with the boundaries at a given range while still ensonifying the waveguide between the boundaries. As an alternative, here a passive reverberation nulling concept is proposed. In a similar fashion, the observed reverberation defines the response between the source array elements and the dominant sources of boundary reverberation at each range and this is used to drive a range-dependent sequence of projection operators. When these projection operators subsequently are applied to the received data vectors, reverberation can be diminished. The improvement in target detectability is demonstrated using experimental data with an echo repeater simulating the presence of a target.

Robust time reversal focusing in the ocean.

Recent time-reversal experiments with high-frequency transmissions (3.5 kHz) show that stable focusing is severely limited by the time-dependent ocean environments. The vertical focal structure displays dynamic variations associated with focal splitting and remerging resulting in large changes in focal intensity. Numerical simulations verify that the intensity variation is linked to the focal shift induced by phase changes in acoustic waves resulting from sound speed fluctuations due to internal waves. A relationship between focal range shift, frequency shift, or channel depth changes is illustrated using waveguide-invariant theory. Based on the analysis of experimental data and numerical simulations, methods for robust time-reversal focusing are developed to extend the period of stable focusing.