Channel Modeling and SNR Enhancement for Coil to Magnetic Field Sensor Underwater Communication

Conventional magneto-inductive communication systems use coils as a sender and receiver. These coils are usually bulky, which makes them unsuitable for use in mobile systems such as autonomous underwater vehicles. A proposed way to overcome this limitation on the receiver side is to replace the coil with a highly sensitive broadband magnetic field sensor. This reduces the receiver size significantly and enable mobile applications. In the present work this communication system approach is investigated with respect to underwater environments. In this context the underwater channel is studied for a homogeneous water column as well as for shallow water depths. Furthermore, it can be shown that an improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio can be achieved by using several sensors working in parallel. The results are verified by an experimental prototype.