Evaluation of Image Transmission for Underwater Acoustic Communication

Underwater acoustic(UWA) communication is one of the most difficult field because of several factors such as multipath propagation, high temporal and spatial variability of channel conditions. Therefore, it is important to model and analyze the characteristics of underwater acoustic channel such as multipath propagation, transmission loss, reverberation, and ambient noise. In this paper, UWA communication channel is modeled with a ray tracing method and applied to image transmission. Quadrature phase shift keying(QPSK) and multichannel decision feedback equalizer(DFE) are utilized as phase-coherent modulation method and equalization technique, respectively. The objective is to improve the performance of vertical sensor array than that of single sensor in the viewpoint of bit error rate(BER), constellation output, and received image quality.