Abstract
The accurate prediction of underwater acoustic communication system performance at high frequencies is essential to system risk mitigation prior to deployment. The deterioration of acoustic coherence by ocean surface dynamics will be predicted via three dimensional (3-D) ray tracing with the inclusion of interaction with a realistic dynamic ocean surface. Acoustic communication performance limits at high frequencies for most fixed platform systems are dominated by multipath interaction with the spectrally rich heaving ocean. The high-fidelity Wave-watch III surface spectra model is used here with a wave-number integration approach for surface time series modeling. A fully 3-D ray tracing model is used to model the propagation of sound under a dynamic surface boundary at the time and spatial scales that dominate coherence degrading effects for underwater acoustic communications. The proposed method will serve the rapid development of operating regimes for high-frequency underwater acoustic communication systems. Proposed applications include distributed underwater sensor networks and persistent deployable low-cost systems that meet a wide range of underwater sensing needs. This work seeks to solve problems in deploying advanced communication systems by predicting the degradation of signals due to ocean variability and automatically selecting appropriate signaling rates, schemes, and constants. [This work was supported by ONR.]