938 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 61, NO. 3, MARCH 2012
Doubly Selective Underwater Acoustic Channel
Model for a Moving Transmitter/Receiver
Chunshan Liu, Yuriy V. Zakharov, Senior Member, IEEE , and Teyan Chen
Abstract—We propose a new method of modeling the signal
transmission in underwater acoustic communications when the
transmitter and receiver are moving. The motion-induced channel
time variations can be modeled by sampling the transmitter/
receiver trajectory at the signal sampling rate and calculating, for
each position, the channel impulse response from the acoustic-field
computation. This approach, however, would result in high com-
plexity. To reduce the complexity, the channel impulse response
is calculated for fewer (waymark) positions and then interpolated
by local splines to recover it at the signal sampling rate. To allow
higher distances between waymarks and, thus, further reduction
in the complexity, the multipath delays are appropriately adjusted
before the interpolation. Because, for every time instant, this
method only requires local information from the trajectory, the
impulse response can recursively be computed, and therefore, the
signal transmission can be modeled for arbitrarily long trajec-
tories. An approach for setting the waymark sampling interval
is suggested and investigated. The proposed method is verified
by comparing the simulated data with data from real ocean ex-
periments. For a low-frequency shallow-water experiment with a
moving source that transmits a tone set, we show that the Doppler
spectrum of the received tones is similar in the simulation and
experiment. For a higher frequency deep-water experiment with
a fast-moving source that transmits orthogonal frequency-division
multiplexing (OFDM) communication signals, we investigate the
detection performance of a receiver and show that it is similar in
the simulation and experiment.
Index Terms—B-spline, channel modeling, channel simulator,
Doppler spread, local splines, orthogonal frequency-division mul-
tiplexing (OFDM), underwater acoustic communications.
NOMENCLATURE
(·)
T
Matrix transpose.
C
(m)
mth column of a matrix C.
m Index for waymarks.
n Index for signal samples.
i Index for taps of the channel impulse response.
k Index for frequencies.
{·} Real part.
Manuscript received May 4, 2011; revised September 15, 2011 and
December 14, 2011; accepted January 18, 2012. Date of publication February 7,
2012; date of current version March 21, 2012. This paper was presented in part
at the Fourth Underwater Acoustic Measurements: Technologies, and Results
Conference, Kos, Greece, June 20–24, 2011. The review of this paper was
coordinated by Prof. T. Kuerner.
The authors are with the Department of Electronics, University of York,
YO10 5DD York, U.K. (e-mail: cl563@ohm.york.ac.uk; yz1@ohm.york.ac.uk;
tc512@ohm.york.ac.uk).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVT.2012.2187226
I. INTRODUCTION
The performance of underwater acoustic communication
systems is heavily dependent on the propagation environ-
ment. The underwater channel is considered one of the most
difficult channels for communications [1]. For assessing the
communications performance, sea experiments are required.
Although sea experiments are ultimate means of assessing
the performance, they are difficult to conduct and are very
expensive. In some situations, instead, the simulation of the
propagation channel can be used. The simulation also has other
advantages compared to experiments. For example, due to the
highly dynamic time and space variability of the underwater
environment, it is difficult to guarantee similar experimental
conditions when comparing different systems. It is also difficult
to provide reliable monitoring of the environment and thus give
valuable interpretation of experimental results. Furthermore,
ocean experiments with multiple users (such as in underwater
communications networks) are even more complicated. On the
other hand, computer simulation can provide exactly the same
propagation conditions when investigating different systems,
precise monitoring of the environment, and modeling commu-
nication networks with multiple users. However, this case is
possible only if the simulator can provide results similar to the
results observed in sea experiments. Thus, an efficient approach
for simulating underwater acoustic signal transmission is highly
desirable [2]–[4].
Two important phenomena that affect the performance of
underwater acoustic communications are multipath propagation
and the Doppler effect [2], [3], [5], [6]. Thus, the under-
water acoustic channel is doubly selective. Although, time-
varying multipath channel models are widely used to analyze
radio communication systems (see [7]–[9] and the references
therein), they are not directly applicable to underwater acoustic
communications [2], [10]. For radio communications, Jakes’
model combined with a set of standard power delay profiles
with fixed multipath delays is often considered useful for study-
ing the system performance [11]. The important feature of the
underwater acoustic channel is the fast variation of multipath
delays due to a low speed of sound. As a result, the signal
distortion that is caused by the Doppler effect in the underwater
channel includes the time compression/dilation that is different
for different multipath components (see [2], [6], [12]–[15], and
the references therein). Another important consideration is that
a particular sea area can provide specific propagation conditions
that should be taken into account when studying underwater
acoustic systems. To account for the phenomena in the channel
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