High-speed underwater wireless communication using acoustic angular momentum multiplexing
Abstract
High-speed underwater wireless communication is crucial for many naval applications including networking between (moving) underwater, platforms in the battlefield and notably information dumping between autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and underwater base stat,ions for searching, detection, and exploration missions. However, our radio-frequency (RF) based daily communication cannot work und,erwater due to the strong absorption of the wave energy. Optical communication is not a proper option for mid- and long-range underw,ater communication because of the short wavelength making it easy to be scattered. Till now, acoustic wave is the dominant informati,on carrier underwater. However, the relatively low frequency and bandwidth of acoustic wave limit the communication speed when using, conventional quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), and orthogonal frequency division multipl,exing (OFDM). To break this bottleneck, the PI (Dr. Shi) conducted a proof-of-concept experiment with airborne sound to demonstrate, the potential of high-speed communication through acoustic OAM multiplexing. Acoustic OAM is a physical quantity that characterize, the rotation of pressure wave front, which is typically found in acoustic vortex waves. Acoustic OAM multiplexing is an information, encoding technique through the modulation of the spatial degrees of freedom of vortex waves that can be generated and sensed by pha,se arrays and is orthogonal (and independent) to the temporal and frequency modulation based QPSK, QAM, and OFDM. Thus, the OAM mult,iplexing in theory can be added to the state-of-the-art communication scheme to significantly enhance the information capacity of an, acoustic pulse and the communication speed. While the acoustic OAM multiplexing technique is a promising candidate to be applied to, break the underwater communication speed bottleneck when combined with the state-of-the-art modulation technologies, the underwater, transmission, robustness, compatibility with other modulation techniques, and potential drawbacks of the OAM based communication ne,ed to be characterized before it is ready to be implemented for high-speed mid- and long-range underwater communication. These cruci,al fundamental investigations were not explored because most of acoustic OAM communication experiments were performed in the air. Th,is proposed research focuses on rigorously investigate the transmission, detection, communication performance, robustness, and compa,tibility with existing technologies to identify the capability of acoustic OAM communication capability in practical naval applicati,ons through both theoretical modeling and analysis as well as experimental measurements in a large water tank and at sea. The succes,s of the proposed project will pave the way towards mid- and long-range high-speed underwater wireless communication that is essenti,al for the Navy. Approved for Public Release.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 08, 2022
- Source ID
- N000142212551
Entities
People
- Chengzhi Shi
Organizations
- Georgia Tech Research Corporation
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy