Low-Power Microcontroller-based Acoustic Modem for Underwater Robot Communication

This paper presents a low-power microcontroller-based acoustic modem for low-range communication based on aspects of whale and dolphin communication. The approach is to decrease influences by using a frequency shift keying (FSK) modulation combined with frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS). Addressing individual recipients (unicast) as well as a group (multicast) or all recipients (broadcast) is done by spreading the outgoing signal by orthogonal signatures. Using these signatures means an overhead of the transmitted data but increases the interference resistance and the reliability of the communication.