M-ary Cyclic Shift Keying Spread Spectrum Underwater Acoustic Communications Based on Virtual Time-Reversal Mirror

Underwater acoustic communications are challenging because channels are complex, and acoustic waves when propagating in the ocean are subjected to a variety of interferences, such as noise, reflections, scattering and so on. Spread spectrum technique thus has been widely used in underwater acoustic communications for its strong anti-interference ability and good confidentiality. Underwater acoustic channels are typical coherent multipath channels, in which the inter-symbol interference seriously affects the performance of underwater acoustic communications. Time-reversal mirror technique utilizes this physical characteristic of underwater acoustic channels to restrain the inter-symbol interference by reconstructing multipath signals and reduce the influence of channel fading by spatial focusing. This paper presents an M-ary cyclic shift keying spread spectrum underwater acoustic communication scheme based on the virtual time-reversal mirror. Compared to the traditional spread spectrum techniques, this method is more robust, for it uses the M-ary cyclic shift keying spread spectrum to improve the communication rate and uses the virtual time-reversal mirror to ensure a low bit error rate. The performance of this method is verified by simulations and pool experiments.