Underwater acoustic networks (UWAN) play a crucial role in the development of modern marine military defense and civilian marine. In many cases, the simulation of routing and MAC protocols in underwater acoustic network has ignored the impact of some critical features of complex underwater acoustic channel upon UWAN performances. This paper establishes a channel model for the Rayleigh fading channel in shallow-water medium-range communication in OPNET network simulation software. It simulates the time-varying and multi-path effects of underwater acoustic channel, which are reflected in the received power and bit error rate. Finally the validity of this channel model is verified by simulations.

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