Real-time Through-water Video Streaming Using a High-rate Underwater Acoustic OFDM System

Real-time video streaming through the underwater acoustic (UA) channel is challenging due to the limited bandwidth. In this paper, we present a high-rate, reconfigurable software-defined UA communication system that we recently developed, which is capable of real-time through-water video streaming. The transmitter consists of a universal software radio peripheral interfaced with a high-frequency transducer through a broadband impedance matching network designed in house. The transmitter and receiver signal processing algorithms are implemented using Python and run on external host computers. The system can reach a data rate of 445 kbps using a single transducer. The prototype system is tested in a UA communication experiment conducted in a hydroacoustic tank. Experimental results show that together with our video processing algorithms, this system can transmit real-time video with a high quality.