Time-reversal communications in a hostile, reverberative environment

Time-reversal (T/R) communications is a new application area motivated by the recent advances in T/R theory. T/R receivers offer an interesting solution to the communications problem for a reverberant channel. This paper describes the performance of various realizations of the T/R receiver for an acoustic communications experiment in air. An experiment is developed to evaluate the performance of point-to-point T/R receivers designed to extract a transmitted information sequence propagating in a hostile, highly reverberant environment. It is demonstrated that T/R receivers are capable of extracting the transmitted coded sequence from noisy microphone sensor measurements with reasonable success. The processing required to validate these experimental results is discussed. These results are also compared with those produced by an equivalent linear equalizer or inverse filter, which provides the optimal solution when it incorporates all of the reverberations.