Highly Directional Multipath Free High Data-Rate Communications With a Reconfigurable Modem

This paper presents a high data-rate underwater acoustic communication system that does not rely on large, powerful, and computationally complex modems. Our small size, weight, and power system is a reconfigurable acoustic modem platform (RAMP) that exploits transducer directivity to reduce the effects of multipath and mutual interference, thus eliminating the need for a traditional channel equalizer. Experimental results are shown to demonstrate the feasibility of RAMP in a shallow-water ocean environment to deliver real-time data transfer.