Influence of the dynamic sea surface on underwater acoustic communication

As sound is propagating in shallow water, the interaction with the sea surface plays an important role. The sound waves become dispersed in both time and space as they are scattered from the rough and time-varying surface. This fact is limiting the performance of underwater acoustic communication systems as the surface interaction induces an unwanted, random modulation of the transmitted signals. A ray model and a surface scattering model are combined and used to estimate the time-varying impulse response of the shallow water communication channel. The impulse response is used to evaluate the performance of underwater acoustic communication systems.
This research project is carried out as a Ph.D. study. The thesis advisor is Professor Leif Bjørnø.