Coherent underwater communication using passive time reversal over multipath channels

Passive time reversal exploits underwater acoustic channels’ spatial and temporal diversity. It can refocus multipath propagated signal at the receiver and can be realized simply by the passive phase conjugation (PPC) method. By the temporal focusing, time delay spread caused by multipath propagation is mitigated for spectral efficient coherent communications. However, the PPC method is unable to eliminate multipath and is limited by channel variations. An adaptive equalizer is therefore needed to compensate residual multipath after refocusing and to track channel temporal variations. Spatial diversity is obtained by using a vertical receiving array. In this paper we used 4-hydrophone array and demonstrated that the adaptive decision feedback equalization in conjunction with PPC significantly decreased the bit error rate.