Design and implementation of a bidirectional acoustic micro-modem for underwater communication systems

For the devices requiring short and medium range underwater acoustic communication, acoustic modem should possess the properties such as low-power consumption, small size, low cost and high data rate as much as possible. In this paper, We design and implement an efficient bidirectional micro-modem to meet the objectives. Also, based on the developed hardware, indoor and outdoor experiments are executed in a water tank and a river and the performances are evaluated in terms of received signal strength, packet loss probability and bit error rate. Since the modem conforms to the requirements listed above, it could be utilized for various aquatic applications, e.g., underwater wireless sensor networks and underwater robots.