Variability in Shallow Water Communication Performance Near a Busy Shipping Lane

Abstract

We present analysis of a dataset collected at an underwater communications network testbed in Singapore for a contiguous 24-day period in 2018. The communication performance showed strong diurnal variability, mainly due to changes in arrival timings of various ray paths. The observed changes are believed to be caused primarily by sound speed changes due to bubbles advected from the nearby shipping channel. Diurnal noise variability also contributed to performance variability. This work demonstrates the importance of longterm communication datasets in improving our understanding of the acoustic communication channel.