Multiuser underwater acoustic communication for an AUV fleet

The objective of this paper is to investigate multiuser communication protocols in the framework of Underwater Acoustic (UWA) communication for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)s fleet. By combining Hyperbolically Frequency Modulated (HFM) chirp and Pseudo-Noise (PN) spreading sequence we propose a very robust multi-user protocol that allows a very simple decoding based on matched filtering. The implementations of this protocol for the UWA scenario is described, and the performance results over a simulated shallow water UWA channel are compared against conventional multiuser protocols.