SWARA: The Path Loss Model For Underwater Acoustic Communication

For wireless underwater acoustic communication, tank channels are the most difficult channels to model than any other channel due to multipath effects. In underwater (UW) tanks with different operating conditions, multipath interference makes it difficult to predict path loss (fading) effects at the receiver. It has been observed that path loss models proposed for sea channels cannot be directly applied to UW tank scenarios due to variations in the multipath structure, UW tank wall types and water properties. In this paper, we have proposed a deterministic path loss model which can be used for investigating attenuation due to multipath in UW tank channel for point-to-point acoustic communication. To propose and validate simulation results, we have compared experimentally collected samples with theoretically reconstructed samples of the received signals. The accuracy of the proposed path loss model is measured using the root mean square error statistic. The proposed model has shown an improvement of 5.39% and 25.86% compared to results proposed by Rayleigh and Thorp (RT) and Rayleigh and Cylindrical Spread (RCS) model. We believe that the proposed multipath model can be used extensively to design accurate attenuation for UW acoustic communication in tank scenarios.