,
Volume 1, Issue 1 (1-2005)
Abstract
In an environment such as underwater channel where placing test equipments are
difficult to handle, it is much practical to have hardware simulators to examine suitably
designed transceivers (transmitter/receiver). The simulators of this kind will then allow
researchers to observe their intentions and carry out repetitive tests to find suitable digital
coding/decoding algorithms.
In this paper, a simplified shallow water digital data transmission system is first introduced.
The transmission channel considered here is a stochastic DSP hardware model in which
signal degradations leads to a severe distortion in phase and amplitude (fades) across the
bandwidth of the received signal. A computer base-band channel model with frequency
non-selective feature is derived by the authors [10-11]. This system was based on fullraised
cosine channel modelling and proved to be the most suitable for vertical and shortrange
underwater communication csdfher), with a reflected path (specula component, when
the acoustic hydrophone receives reflected signals from surface and bottom of the sea) and
a random path (diffused component, when the acoustic hydrophone receives scattered
signals from the volume of the sea). The model assumed perfect transmitter-receiver
synchronization but utilized realistic channel time delays, and demonstrated the timevarying
characteristics of an underwater acoustic channel observed in practice. In this
paper, they are used to provide a full system simulation in order to design an adaptive
receiver employing the most advanced digital signal processing techniques in hardware to
predict realizable error performances.
