ACT: an Acoustic Communications Testbed

We address the design of an acoustic communications testbed with the possibility to implement the acoustic feedback. The design focuses on providing an experimental verification for signal processing algorithms that are applicable to both in-air and underwater scenarios. Feedback highlights the possibilities of acquiring channel conditions, and enables adaptation on the transmit side. We demonstrate our testbed through multi-user multi-carrier uplink and downlink communications and adaptive modulations. The fully-software defined, flexible and expandable testbed provides an ideal platform for the development of the next-generation of acoustic communications. Experimental results show that with the proper feedback, the proposed communication schemes provide excellent performance that without feedback would not have been possible, and making them suitable for practical implementations.