Underwater acoustic MIMO channel capacity

Abstract

The underwater acoustic channel is rich in multipath scattering, making it a promising environment for the application of MIMO communications. However, for typical underwater communications channels, there are difficulties associated with the large fractional bandwidths, significant Doppler dispersion and latencies measured in seconds. We use simulated and experimental data to estimate the channel capacity for typical shallow water MIMO channels, and motivate particular beamforming algorithms which cope with the difficult acoustic environment.