Underwater Acoustic Communications

This proposal is concerned with the development of very long range acoustic communications (acomms) with submerged submarines with towed arrays . To achieve long ranges, we must move down from our conventional signaling above 10 kHz, to a frequency regime which imposes little attenuation on the signals. Based upon the availability of an extensive, well-documented long-range sonar data base, we propose using the Very Low Frequency band (e.g., below perhaps 200 Hz). The sonar data supports the estimation of channel scattering functions, which will be used explicitly to "channelized" telemetry waveforms by simulation. We will evaluate telemetry performance of these "received" waveforms.