Access/Technology provider: NATO STO, T-LOON
End User: Norwegian Research Center NORCE, Norway [Academia]
Dates: 01-01-2020 to 28-02-2021
Goals: This TNA focuses on the design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of a Channel State Information (CSI) acquisition scheme for adaptive underwater acoustic communications.
A CSI acquisition scheme consists of:
- i) channel probing signals
- ii) a control signaling protocol, and
- iii) signal processing at the transmitter. The estimated channel state information is used for adapting the transmission parameters.
The project objectives are:
- experimental evaluation of the CSI quality at the transmitter;
- creation of a data set to be shared within the participants academic community for student projects intended to develop know-how, skills, and experience in underwater acoustic communications;
- creation of a data set that can be recursively analyzed and potentially can help identify the challenges and the solutions for making CSI at the transmitter good enough for adaptive schemes. This will make adaptive schemes feasible and effective for UAC.
The project addressed the challenge of making adaptive communication schemes effective in the context of underwater sensor networks. Adaptive schemes can improve the communication performance in terms of spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and reliability, but in the context of UAC they have not been fully explored and exploited yet. Therefore, this project fills the compelling knowledge gap on good quality CSI acquisition at the transmitter for the development of the next generation of underwater acoustic communication systems.
This project was led by NORCE with collaboration with the University of Padova (Italy), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA) and ISEN Yncréa Ouest (France). The underwater and wireless communication communities at large benefit from this project as it provides a “unique” data set of bidirectional underwater communications. Thanks to the data set acquired in this experiment, it is possible to quantify the performance gain of an adaptive communication scheme. Evaluation of the channel reciprocity and quantification of the quality of the CSI available at the transmitter is now possible, as well as how well an ‘eavesdropper’ could infer the data quality of in-range bidirectional communication.
The PI and the partners intend to publish the results of the analysis carried out on this data set in the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering. Few other potential extension studies on information security and the use of adaptive communication schemes can originate additional journal publications.