Hardware and Software Co-design of a Single-Carrier Modulation (SCM) Acoustic Communication System

Most of the recent software-defined underwater acoustic modems are based on the commercial SDR platform. The implementation of the physical layer is either solely software-defined with high processing latency or partially hardware-defined but without adequate reconfiguration capabilities. This paper demonstrates a flexible implementation of a high-frequency acoustic transceiver with Single-Carrier Modulation (SCM) in contrast to the common orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). We explore the hardware and software co-design based on the System on a Chip (SoC) architecture consisting of ARM processors and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The partition of the data processing modules on the processing system (PS) and programmable logic (PL) is discussed at both the transmit and receive chains. The real-time reconfiguration capability on most of the processing modules is also described. Different data processing architectures as well as the real-time reconfiguration capabilities of the proposed design have been evaluated in the lake environments.