Performance Analysis of Time Reversal Underwater Acoustic Communication

In this paper, the bit error rate (BER) performance of time reversal (TR)-underwater acoustic communication (UAC) and non-TR-UAC is evaluated, considering channel degradation effects, namely sound speed, multipath scattering, spreading and absorption. TR is a signal harvesting strategy that utilizes multipath to focus the signal wave power in time and space. Specialized beam tracing software BELLHOP interfaced with MATLAB is used to obtain the results. Simulation results show that the BER performance of quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulated UAC system varies due to variations in sound speed over space and time caused by different oceanic and atmospheric conditions. Results show that BER reduces in 0-400 m depth from the sea surface compared to 400-1500 m depth due to high sound speed in the former region. At 3dB SNR, TR-UAC outperforms non-TR-UAC systems by 98%, demonstrating multipath exploitation.