Wireless Underwater Channel Modelling for Acoustic Communication

Underwater channel modelling is very essential to establish acoustic communication underwater. It helps AUVs to navigate safely by avoiding collisions. But a lot of complexities are involved in acoustic communication as there will be reflections from the water surfaces. The main factors that are influencing underwater communication are transmission loss, noise, multipath, Doppler spread, and propagation delay. These parameters made available the acoustic channel's bandwidth restricted and drastically subject to both range and frequency. The terrestrial communication parameters are not suitable to the underwater communication and hence require a dictated system design. The underwater channel modelling includes the finding of signal to noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver, transmission path loss and path gain for a particular path due to multipath propagation, and the noise level in the propagation path. An underwater channel communication model for sonar data is developed by considering the case of multipath propagation in shallow water.