BER of Dual-Hop Underwater Acoustic Communication Using Vector Sensors

Owing to steady increase in demand for higher data rate and less BER, there is growing attention on how to exploit multi-hop communication techniques to mitigate this problem. Multi-hop communication proves to be an endowment specially in underwater acoustic communication (UAC), where the bandwidth is limited by the distance between transmitter and receiver. It has been proved that Vector Sensors (VS) can measure the performance of UAC over a long range by measuring particle motion along with pressure changes associated with a sound wave. In this paper, we present dual-hop communication model for UAC where the relay is assumed to be a VS. The path gain for p-th path is modeled as a function of angle of arrival (AoA) and it is observed to be log-normal distributed when AoA is Gaussian distributed. Performance in terms of BER is computed for two system architectures i) when both relay and destination are VS ii) when both are pressure sensors (PS). Expectedly, the VS based communication systems perform better.