Development of software-defined acoustic communication platform and its evaluations

In recent years, researches of underwater sensor networks have continued to investigate environment and resources of the sea. Acoustic waves are used instead of radio waves for wireless communication in underwater. However, dedicated hardware is very expensive, experiments on the sea are very time-consuming, and huge water spaces are necessary to study the underwater acoustic communication. In this paper, we present a cheap and tractable software-defined acoustic communication platform running on PCs using MATLAB, and evaluate its characteristics in a variety of communication methods by changing modulation schemes, error correction codes, transmission power and frequency by using commercial speaker and microphone devices. Our current implementation achieves data rate of up to 4.5 Kbps.