Coding for Short Messages in Multipath Underwater Acoustic Communication Channels

This paper applies the full tail-biting (FTB) convolutional codes to short data packets and evaluates their performance in underwater acoustic communication by computer simulation and an ocean experiment. The simulation results for AWGN channels show that the FTB codes achieve the similar bit error rate (BER) performance as the zero-tailing convolutional (ZTC) codes regardless of block lengths, while the direct-truncate convolutional (DTC) codes suffer from BER degradation, specially with short block lengths. Both simulation and ocean experimental results demonstrate that the FTB codes are excellent candidates for underwater acoustic communication systems where short data blocks and strong error correction codes are needed.