Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding and Modulation for Underwater Acoustic Communication

Underwater communication is a promising technology to provide ubiquitous network connectivity, where acoustic waves are used as the primary carrier for long-range communication. It has been a challenging research topic to efficiently transmit images with under-water acoustic communication (UAC), due to its inherently narrow bandwidth, strong signal attenuation, time-varying multipath propagation, and low propagation speed. In this paper, we present a new approach to addressing these limitations in UAC, namely the joint source-channel coding and modulation (JSCCM) based on a deep neural network (DNN). We develop a training method of DNN-based encoder and decoder, which directly encode/decode image-pixel values to modulated symbols, unlike conventional separation-based source and channel coding and modulation. Through numerical simulations, the deep JSCCM is confirmed to achieve significantly higher data-rate than conventional schemes.