Design and Implementation of Differential Chirp Spread Spectrum System for Underwater Acoustic Communication

Over the last decades, digital underwater acoustic communications have received much interest in diverse applications such as connecting underwater vehicles and exploring natural resources. The differential chirp spread spectrum (DCSS) is proposed as an effective modulation for long-range communication because of its ability to face the severe signal degradation caused by multipath propagation and high Doppler shift and spread of the underwater acoustic channel (UWAC). In this work, we propose a step-by-step implementation of our proposed DCSS system. Based on the underwater acoustic link budget and the characterization of the used hardware, we perform the DCSS system at different ranges. Finally, we verify the system performance through experiments in real UWAC.