Electrical & Electronics Engineering
Enabling Cooperative Diversity Techniques for Underwater Acoustic
Communications
ABSTRACT
The project focuses on acoustic communications, which is the most viable and technologically mature option for wireless
transmission under water. Despite its obvious advantages and wide range of potential application areas, the widespread
deployment of underwater acoustic communications (UWA) systems has been hampered by their limited data rates and
relatively short link ranges. In this project, we envision cooperative diversity, which has been originally proposed for
terrestrial radio channels, as an enabling technique to address the demanding performance requirements of next generation
UWA communications. Specifically, we consider an UWA communications network, which consists of both mobile
and stationary nodes which exchange data such as control, telemetry, speech, and video signals among themselves as
well as a central node located at a ship or onshore. The submerged nodes (which can, for example, take the form of an
autonomous underwater vehicle/robot or diver) can be equipped with various sensors, sonars, video cameras, or other types
of data acquisition instruments. In this project, we will present physical layer solutions for such an UWA wireless network
developing efficient, reliable, and high-speed