Enhanced underwater acoustic communication performance using space-time coding and processing

Recent advances in information theory and terrestrial wireless communication show that significant performance gains are achievable with increased signaling diversity through the use of multiple transmit and receive arrays. An effective approach for increasing data rate over wireless channels is to employ coding techniques appropriate for multiple transmit antennas, namely space-time coding. This paper investigates the feasibility and effectiveness of space-time trellis and layered space-time codes for the shallow-water, acoustic, frequency-selective channel. Using data collected during a recent experiment in the Mediterranean, we show that systems using multiple transmit and receive transducers outperform more conventional single-transmit single-receiver configurations.