Effect of frequency dependent multipath fading on non-coherent underwater communication system

Underwater acoustic communication channel is often defined as a multipath fading channel since the multipath arrivals from various paths interfere with each other and cause frequency dependent constructive or destructive interference in received signals. Therefore signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of received signal fluctuates as a function of frequency. In addition, sea surface fluctuation induces frequency dependent time variant signal fading due to coherent component variation of surface bounce path. The frequency shift keying (FSK) system is known to be less sensitive and more robust under these interference and fading, and M-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK) system is adopted to increase a data rate. In this study, a bit error rate (BER) of 4 channels 4FSK system are examined in shallow sea multipath channel. Experimental results show that RS code reduces efficiently the BER of 4FSK system since frequency dependent time-varying fading is characterized to give burst errors. The BER of a different data rate or different source-to-receiver range depends on not only the channel coherent bandwidth but also frequency dependent multipath fading.