Software-Defined Underwater Acoustic Modems for Arctic-Like Environments

A wide range of underwater sensor network applications have developed in the recent years. They include applications such as surveillance of coastal water in the Arctic. Underwater communications in Arctic-like environments is challenging. The ice cover in an upward refracting environment creates substantial signal scattering. We simulate the underwater Arctic condition for BPSK, FSK, FH-CPFSK and OFDM signals. We present the results of the performance analysis for these modulation schemes and transmission techniques. The simulated conditions consist of 0%, 20%, 40% and 80% of ice cover over a distance of 5 km and 20% of ice cover over a distance of 10 km with upward refraction . We concluded that FSK and FH-CPFSK are more efficient than BPSK and OFDM. We observed that at lower levels of Eb/N0, FH-CPFSK performs better and on higher levels of Eb/N0 FSK performs better. In the absence of ice cover FH-CPFSK outperforms FSK.