Interpreting the Underwater Acoustic Channel Impulse Response and Doppler Spread Using Braid Representations

We investigate underwater acoustic environment characteristics and shallow water channel interpretation through variation of the multipath scattering parameters and their impact on the Delay-Doppler spread function using geometric feature representations. We generate a diverse portfolio of simulated channels using well-known statistical models of shallow water acoustic multipath propagation, across variations of shallow underwater acoustic channel parameters. Specifically, we explore four different variables: water depth, channel range, spreading factor, and number of multipath arrivals, while following the variations shown on delay-doppler spread function. In each simulated channel, we provide the feature representation of the channel interpreted in terms of the separable channel multipath arrivals. This work can potentially be beneficial in understanding distinct underwater terrains in real time as well as predicting the rapid fluctuations in the shallow water channel, both in delay-time and delay-doppler domain representations.