Effect of Environment on Underwater Acoustic Communication Data Rates

Underwater acoustic communication has several applications for civilians and defence. It is a challenging engineering problem, where large variability of ambient noise and highly variable channel characteristics limits the performance of communication system. In addition horizontal transmissions in shallow water is considered very challenging due to time varying delay spread and significant Doppler spread. An experiment was conducted to study the diurnal variability of underwater acoustic communication channel properties of the south west coast of India. Time spread and bit error rate for different ranges and depths are compared in this paper. Influence of prevailing sound speed profile on acoustic communication link is also discussed.