Underwater Acoustic Communication Using Vector Sensor in KOREX-17

Sound propagating through shallow-water waveguide undergoes inter-symbol interference (ISI) by multiple interactions with sea surface and bottom interfaces. Time reversal techniques using an array of spatially separated receivers have been widely used to reduce the effect of ISI. However, the time reversal method requires a large-size receiver array to improve the communication performance, which results in the degradation of space efficiency. The vector sensor measures acoustic pressure signal as well as x, y, and z-components of the particle velocity at a single point, and these signals can be used as a single-input multiple-output system (SIMO) for underwater acoustic communication. An underwater communication experiment using a vector sensor was made as part of the Korea Reverberation Experiment (KOREX-17) on May 24–25, 2017 in shallow water at location 34°43’ N, 128°39’ E. The communication results show that proposed technique(the block-based time reversal technique using the vector sensor) is useful in the time varying shallow water.