Performance of high data rate acoustic underwater communication systems using adaptive beamforming and equalizing

An analytic approach is presented to assess the performance of an acoustic communication system from an underwater vehicle to its mothership where the signals from the receive array are processed by an adaptive beamformer followed by an adaptive equalizer. A generalized signal-to-noise ratio, and the related error data rate of the digital transmission, are derived from the steady-state responses of the adaptive beamformer and the adaptive equalizer, as a function of the transmitter, receiver and water depths, the transmission range, the surface and the bottom reflection coefficients, the frequency range, the digital modulation type (M-PSK and M-QAM), the transmit power and the sizes of the projector and the receive array. Some results are given from a computer evaluation of the analytic expressions