Design Development and Experimental Validation of an Underwater Acoustic Pinger System

Acoustic pingers are low data rate signalling systems which play an important role in many underwater applications. In this paper we design and develop a long-range, narrowband non-coherent frequency shift keying based underwater acoustic pinger system. We compute the acoustic link budget such that the pinger system is operational upto a communication range of 1000 meters. The proposed pinger system is experimentally validated in a 50 meter long shallow basin facility. Results indicate that the proposed system achieves a data rate of fifty bits per second while expending a few milliwatts of electrical power.

I. Introduction

Motivated by the pressing needs of industry and academia to extract useful information from the underwater ambience, researchers have been actively working toward developing newer sensing technologies and underwater signal transportation techniques [1]. Such underwater sensing systems and technologies find applications in coastal surveillance and security, monitoring of acquatic animals, fisheries, oceanographic data collection, sub-sea mapping, pollution monitoring in environmental systems etc [2], [3].