Spatiotemporal Acoustic Communication by a Single Sensor via Rotational Doppler Effect

A longstanding pursuit in information communication is to increase transmission capacity and accuracy, with multiplexing technology playing as a promising solution. To overcome the challenges of limited spatial information density and systematic complexity in acoustic communication, here real-time spatiotemporal communication is proposed and experimentally demonstrated by a single sensor based on the rotational Doppler effect. The information carried in multiplexed orbital-angular-momentum (OAM) channels is transformed into the physical quantities of the temporal harmonic waveform and simultaneously detected by a single sensor. This single-sensor configuration is independent of the channel number and encoding scheme. The parallel transmission of complicated images is demonstrated by multiplexing eight OAM channels and achieving an extremely-low bit error rate (BER) exceeding 0.02%, owing to the intrinsic discrete frequency shift of the rotational Doppler effect. The immunity to inner-mode crosstalk and robustness to noise of the simple and low-cost communication paradigm offers promising potential to promote relevant fields.