Sustained underwater acoustic communications with environmental-based time-reversal.

The usage of time-reversal in underwater communications relies on array channel matched-filtering, coherent channel replica alignment and summation. Traditionally, replicas are channel responses to probe signals received at a previous time. These are noisy and subject to distortion due to channel variability. This paper offers an alternative where noisy and potentially distorted channel replicas are replaced by noise-free and time-updated replicas generated by a numerical model constrained on previously data-identified environmental parameters. The method is applied on real data, where a quadrature phase shift key modulated signal on a 25.6 kHz carrier at 4 kbit/s was transmitted in a shallow water area over a distance of approximately 900 m. Sustained analysis without supervision shows that the proposed method may attain a mean square error gain up to 5.4 dB when compared to traditional time-reversal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]