Underwater acoustic distance measurement using fast fourier transform overlap

Most of the underwater applications such as underwater acoustic communication require usage of high cost hardware devices. This constraint limits the research activities within this field. In due to cost limitation, there is a need to develop a low cost underwater communication device but still able to provide good performance to achieve the objectives. In this paper, underwater acoustic distance measurement system based on fast Fourier transform (FFT) overlap using low cost hardware platform is presented. Time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation is derived based on the intensity of the received signal with frequency of interest after computing forward FFT. The extraction of the signal from the receiver is performed by using digital signal processing algorithms. Strength of the received signal and its distance from the receiver are measured during the experiments. The experimental results are presented to demonstrate its capabilities.