An acoustic communication system for multiple underwater vehicles based on DS-CDMA

This paper proposes an underwater acoustic communication system based on DS-CDMA (direct sequence code division multiple access) for multiple underwater vehicles. Multiple underwater vehicles in this system can communicate with the console on the water surface simultaneously without interference. The communication system is composed of channel encoding and decoding, spread spectrum modulation and demodulation, RF (radio frequency) modulation and RAKE receiver to improve the communication reliability. As an important factor that affects the quality of acoustic communication, the underwater channel is also taken into account. The simulation results indicate that it is feasible to use this system to accomplish underwater communication reliably due to the small BER (bit error ratio).