Estimation of Time Difference Using Cross-Correlation in Underwater Environment

Abstract

Recently, underwater acoustic communication (UWAC) has been studied by many scholars and researchers. In order to use UWAC, we need to estimate time difference between the two signals in underwater environment. Typically, there are major three methods to estimate the time-difference between the two signals such as estimating the arrival time of the first non-background segment and calculate the temporal difference, calculating the cross-correlation between the two signal to infer the time-lagged, and estimating the phase delay to infer the time difference. In this paper, we present calculating the cross-correlation between the two signals to infer the time-lagged to apply UWAC. We also present the experimental result of estimating the arrival time by using cross-correlation. We get EXCORR = 0.003055 second as the estimation error in mean absolute difference.