A frame synchronization method for underwater acoustic communication on mobile platform

In this paper, we propose a frame synchronization method for underwater acoustic communication on mobile platform. This new method involves transmitting signal based on hyperbolic frequency modulated (HFM) signal as a preamble of the frame, while the receiver uses a correlator which is matched to the transmitted signal. This method can provide us with good signal detection ability which is very important in underwater acoustic (UWA) channels, and can provide Doppler scale estimation for accurate synchronization. It can also provide multiple access capability for UWA communication network. We analyze and simulate the performance of the HFM signal. A contrast is made with the linearly-frequency modulated (LFM) signal compared to the LFM based method. The proposed method works with a robust correlation output of the Doppler Effect and is suited to handle the presence of dense multi-path channels.