A new signaling scheme for Underwater Acoustic communications

Underwater Acoustic (UWA) communications has attracted a lot of interest in recent years motivated by a wide range of applications. Different signaling solutions have been developed to date including non-coherent communications, phase coherent systems, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) solutions and multi-carrier based approaches. In this paper, we develop a novel UWA communications paradigm using biomimetic signals. In our scheme, digital information is mapped to the parameters of a class of biomimetic signal set and at the receiver an estimator to obtain the parameter values is utilized. To facilitate this, we develop analytical signal models with nonlinear instantaneous frequencies matching mammalian sound signatures in the time-frequency plane. We provide suitable receiver structures, and present decoding results using data recorded during the Kauai Acomms MURI 2011 (KAM11) UWA communications experiment.