YIP 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 stations for searching, detection, and exploration missions. However, our radio-frequency (RF) based daily communication cannot work underwater due to the strong absorption of the wave energy. Optical communication is not a proper option for mid- and long-range underwater communication because of the short wavelength making it easy to be scattered. Till now, acoustic wave is the dominant information 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 multiplexing (OFDM). To break this bottleneck, the PI (Dr. Shi) conducted a proof-of-concept experiment with airborne sound to demonstratethe potential of high-speed communication through acoustic OAM multiplexing. Acoustic OAM is a physical quantity that characterize the rotation of pressure wavefront, 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 phasearrays and is orthogonal (and independent) to the temporal and frequency modulation based QPSK, QAM, and OFDM. Thus, the OAM multiplexing 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 needto be characterized before it is ready to be implemented for high-speed mid- and long-range underwater communication. These crucialfundamental investigations were not explored because most of acoustic OAM communication experiments were performed in the air. Thisproposed research focuses on rigorously investigate the transmission, detection, communication performance, robustness, and compatibility with existing technologies to identify the capability of acoustic OAM communication capability in practical naval applications through both theoretical modeling and analysis as well as experimental measurements in a large water tank and at sea. The success of the proposed project will pave the way towards mid- and long-range high-speed underwater wireless communication that is essentialfor the Navy. Approved for Public Release.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Nov 08, 2024
- Source ID
- N000142412420
Entities
People
- Chengzhi Shi
Organizations
- Board of Regents of the University of Michigan
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy