Multiple access acoustic communication in underwater mobile networks

This article presents a new multiple access technique for underwater acoustic communication in the framework of AUV fleet. The multiuser scheme is based on a set of orthogonal waveforms built by combining 2 types of HFM signals allowing at the reception side very simple matched filter based decoding. The proposed multiuser technique provides good resilience against multiuser interference while keeping robustness against underwater acoustic channel impairments like Doppler shift. The implementation of this protocol for the underwater acoustic scenario is described, and performance are analysed and compared against conventional TDMA and CDMA techniques over replayed experimental channels for up to 5 AUVs acting as mobile nodes.