Long-range multi-carrier acoustic communication in deep water using a towed horizontal array

Abstract

During a recent long-range acoustic communication experiment carried out in deep water, multi-carrier Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) communication signals were transmitted with a 50 Hz bandwidth (225–275 Hz) at various source-receiver ranges from 100 to 700 km. The experiment consisted of two mobile components: (1) a source towed slowly at a speed of 2–3 knots at ∼75 m depth and (2) a horizontal line array towed at 3.5 knots at a depth of ∼200 m. In addition to beamforming, an interleaver gain is exploited to compensate for low signal-to-noise ratio at the expense of data rate while providing diversity in the frequency domain. Error-free performance is shown at effective data rates of 15 and 7.5 bits/s at ranges of 550 km and 700 km, respectively, by combining interleaved repetitions with low-density parity-check coding after beamforming, demonstrating the feasibility of multi-carrier OFDM communications in deep water using a towed horizontal array.