Experimental demonstration of underwater acoustic communication using bionic signals

This paper applies dolphin whistles to covert underwater acoustic (UWA) communication and proposes a UWA communication scheme based on M-ary bionic signal coding. At the transmitter end, the scheme maps multiple information bits into a dolphin whistle through a signal selector. At the receiver end, passive time reversal mirror (PTRM) is used for channel equalization and source information is restored according to the decision of which whistle is transmitted. The scheme has high spread spectrum gain. The anti multi-path performance is greatly improved when using PTRM. Different from traditional covert UWA communication methods, this mimicked signal is unlikely to alert an adversary even in high SNRs because of its real existence in marine environment. A tank experiment is conducted for the scheme, at communication rate of 50 bit/s with SNR −5 dB user information is recovered at a very low bit error rate. The results of tank experiment demonstrate the feasibility of this covert UWA communication scheme.