Asymptotic performance of a pulse-to-pulse incoherent Doppler sonar in an oceanic environment

Active Doppler sonar systems are gaining popularity as a method to profile remotely the oceanic velocity field. Estimation of the variance with which an ideal single.beam sonar system measures relative Doppler motion is the subject of this paper. Theoretical formulations, simulated reverberation data, and sea data are considered to determine this variance. The sea data considered in this paper were selected carefully to avoid performance degrading physical/instrumental phenomena and bias corrected to remove further instrumental effects. Asymptotic performance, determined in this research, is realized when instrumental and physical phenomena do not measurably affect experimental performance. Oceanic and simulated data sets are processed with several velocity-estimation algorithms that are implemented in existing sonar systems. These algorithms are compared against each other and the velocity-estimation standard-deviation results tabulated. The algorithms are shown to possess similar performance characteristics when simulated, and sea data are processed in spite of the fact that some of these algorithms are suboptimal from a theoretical viewpoint. The results of this study show that the asymptotic performance of the Doppler system examined is approximately 25 percent above a theoretical lower bound.