Experimentation of MIMO underwater acoustic communication in shallow water channel

This paper describes an end-to-end underwater acoustic transmission system based on MIMO (multiple input multiple output) principle. The described transmission system is experimented over various sea conditions and compared against conventional SIMO (single input multiple output) mode operating with a single transmission stream and multiple receive sensors. By analyzing the optimal performance of the proposed decoder, we select a MIMO and SIMO mode achieving similar robustness against underwater acoustic channel and demonstrate over longterm experiment, that, as foreseen by theory, MIMO technology provide a data rate gain at a same robustness level.