Doubly Selective Underwater Acoustic Channel Model for a Moving Transmitter/Receiver

We propose a new method of modeling the signal transmission in underwater acoustic communications when the transmitter and receiver are moving. The motion-induced channel time variations can be modeled by sampling the transmitter/receiver trajectory at the signal sampling rate and calculating, for each position, the channel impulse response from the acoustic-field computation. This approach, however, would result in high complexity. To reduce the complexity, the channel impulse response is calculated for fewer (waymark ) positions and then interpolated by local splines to recover it at the signal sampling rate. To allow higher distances between waymarks and, thus, further reduction in the complexity, the multipath delays are appropriately adjusted before the interpolation. Because, for every time instant, this method only requires local information from the trajectory, the impulse response can recursively be computed, and therefore, the signal transmission can be modeled for arbitrarily long trajectories. An approach for setting the waymark sampling interval is suggested and investigated. The proposed method is verified by comparing the simulated data with data from real ocean experiments. For a low-frequency shallow-water experiment with a moving source that transmits a tone set, we show that the Doppler spectrum of the received tones is similar in the simulation and experiment. For a higher frequency deep-water experiment with a fast-moving source that transmits orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) communication signals, we investigate the detection performance of a receiver and show that it is similar in the simulation and experiment.