Toward hardware-driven simulation of underwater acoustic propagation and communication with Arctic ice, wind waves, and currents

Maritime Way Scientific Ltd (MWS) in collaboration with the Defence Research and Development Canada, Atlantic Research Centre (DRDC-Atlantic) is developing a hardware-in-the-loop acoustic simulator for studying underwater acoustic propagation and the reliability of underwater communications signals. While the simulator can be used to model a wide variety of physical environments, most of the effort has been in adapting existing open source software (i.e. BELLHOP and VirTEX) to handle Arctic seas which may be either partially or fully covered with sea ice, using realistic keel morphology. As the project is still underway this paper presents the overall design, present capability, and some preliminary results. Areas for further improvement are also described.