An underwater acoustic communication scheme exploiting biological sounds

Abstract

Underwater acoustic (UWA) communications have attracted a lot of interest in recent years motivated by a wide range of applications including offshore oil field exploration and monitoring, oceanographic data collection, environmental monitoring, disaster prevention, and port security. Different signaling solutions have been developed to date including non-coherent communications, phase coherent systems, multi-input and multi-output solutions, time-reversal-based communication systems, and multi-carrier transmission approaches. This paper deviates from the traditional approaches to UWA communications and develops a scheme that exploits biomimetic signals. In the proposed scheme, a transmitter maps the information bits to the parameters of a biomimetic signal, which is transmitted over the channel. The receiver estimates the parameters of the received signal and demaps them back to bits to estimate the message. As exemplary biomimetic signals, analytical signal models with nonlinear instantaneous frequency are developed that match mammal sound signatures in the time-frequency plane are developed. Suitable receiver structures as well as performance analysis are provided for the proposed transmission scheme, and some results using data recorded during the Kauai Acomms MURI 2011 UWA communications experiment are presented.

Synthesis and Modification of Cetacean Tonal Sounds for Underwater Bionic Covert Detection and Communication

“…As can be seen from (12) and (14), due to the addition of the curvature adjustment factor  and the slope adjustment factor h , the contour curvature and contour slope of   S s t now depend on its frequency range, duration, parameter h and parameter  . When the frequency range and duration of   S s t are fixed, the contour curvature can be adjusted by changing  , and the contour slope at time 0 t  and t T  can be adjusted by changing k , which is very important for us to mimic the contours of the true tonal sounds as closely as possible.…”

“…The true tonal sounds and their TFSs and the constructed bionic signal waveforms and their TFSs are shown in Figs. [14][15][16][17][18][19]. It can be seen that the constructed bionic signals have a close match to the true tonal sounds in terms of both envelopes and TFSs.…”

“…Conventional bionic signal models about tonal sounds can be mainly divided into two categories [12][13][14][15][16], [24], [25].…”

“…Chris Capus et al proposed a bionic sonar signal model with a double down-chirp structure for bottlenose dolphin clicks [25], and obtained a high-similarity performance for bottlenose dolphin clicks with the double down-chirp structure. Ahmad E. et al modeled dolphin whistles based on the basic FM signal model, such as linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal and hyperbolic frequency modulation (HFM) signal, and designed bionic signals carrying information bits for UAC [13], [14]. Liu et al proposed to use a series of segmented LFM signals carrying digital information to mimic nonlinear frequency modulation (NFM) whistles to achieve bionic covert UAC [15].…”

Dolphin Sounds-Inspired Covert Underwater Acoustic Communication and Micro-Modem

“…The dolphin- and whale-call samples used in the communication algorithm are stored in the SD card in advance. In the PBC micro-modem, we implemented a variety of bionic communication algorithms as described in [ 18 , 21 , 22 ] according to different types of dolphin and whale sounds. It brings a higher degree of algorithmic freedom for practical applications.…”