The Shipborne acoustic communication system of the submersible Shenhai Yongshi works in vertical, horizontal and slant channels according to the relative positions. For ease of use, an array combined by a vertical-cone directional transducer and a horizontal-toroid one is installed on the mothership. Improved techniques are proposed to combat adverse channel conditions, such as frequency selectivity, non-stationary ship noise, and Doppler effects of the platform’s nonlinear movement. For coherent modulation, a turbo-coded single-carrier scheme is used. In the receiver, the sparse decision-directed Normalized Least-Mean-Square soft equalizer automatically adjusts the tap pattern and weights according to the multipath structure, the two receivers’ asymmetry, the signal’s frequency selectivity and the noise’s spectrum fluctuation. The use of turbo code in turbo equalization significantly suppresses the error floor and decreases the equalizer’s iteration times, which is verified by both the extrinsic information transfer charts and bit-error-rate performance. For noncoherent modulation, a concatenated error correction scheme of nonbinary convolutional code and Hadamard code is adopted to utilize full frequency diversity. Robust and lowcomplexity synchronization techniques in the time and Doppler domains are proposed. Sea trials with the submersible to a maximum depth of over 4500 m show that the shipborne communication system performs robustly during the adverse conditions. From the ten-thousand communication records in the 28 dives in 2017, the failure rate of the coherent frames and that of the noncoherent packets are both below 10%, where both synchronization errors and decoding errors are taken into account.
For the first time in the world, underwater acoustic transmission of images, human voice, data and texts between vehicle under 7000 m depth and surface ship was accomplished by underwater acoustic communication system of manned deep submersible Jiaolong＇. In this paper, signal processing in underwater acoustic communication system for manned deep submersible ＂Jiaolong＂ is introduced. （1） Four communication methods are integrated to meet different needs： 1） coherent underwater acoustic communication, with a variable transmission rate from 5 kbps to 15 kbps, to transmit images. 2） Non-coherent underwater acoustic com- munication, with a transmission rate 300 bps, to transmit texts, instructions, and sensor data. 3） Spread spectrum underwater acoustic communication, with a transmission rate 16 bps, to transmit instructions. 4） Underwater voice communication, using single sideband modulation to transmit hmnan voice. （2） Signal processing method in coherent communication mainly consists of concatenation of decision feedback equalizer and Turbo decoder, and wavelet based image compression with fixed length coding. In the equalizer, Doppler compensation, multi- channel combining and equalizer coefficients updating are all using fast self-optimized adaptive algorithm. （3） A linear hydrophone array is lowered from the mother ship to certain depth, and spatial diversity combining technology is adopted. （4） Diving trials of ＂Jiaolong＂ were carried out in Pacific Ocean. The communication range can cover nearly all ocean depth. One optical/acoustic image can be transmitted in 7 or 14 seconds.
Noncoherent underwater acoustic communication channel in adverse conditions is modeled as a phase-random Rayleigh fading channel,and its capacity curve is derived.To approach the channel capacity curve,the concatenated code of the nonbinary LDPC code and the constant weight code is proposed for noncoherent communication which can late be iteratively decoded in the probability domain.Without information of channel amplitude or phase in the receiver,statistic parameters of the respective signal and noise bins were estimated based on the moment estimation method,the posterior probabilities of the constant weight code words were further calculated,and the nonbinary LDPC code was decoded with the nonbinary factor graph algorithm.It is verified by simulations that by utilizing the proposed concatenated code and its processing algorithm,gap to channel capacity curve is reduced by 3 dB when compared to the existing method.Underwater communication experiments were carried out in both deep ocean（vertical communication,5 km）and shallow lake（horizontal communication,near 3 km,delay spread larger than 50 ms）,in which the signal frequency band was 6 kHz to10 kHz,and the data transmission rate Was 357 bps.The proposed scheme can work properly in both experiments with a signal-to-noise ratio threshold of 2 dB.The performance of the proposed algorithm Was well verified by the experiments.
