Design of a General Hardware in the Loop Underwater Communication Emulation System

Abstract

Underwater acoustic communication plays an important role in underwater wireless sensor network. Different from terrestrial radio channel, modeling of underwater acoustic channel is very challenging due to its unique and dynamic characteristics. In order to verify the proposed acoustic communication algorithms, a general emulation platform which can reduce the verification cost has a wide application prospect. In this paper, we design a general hardware in the loop underwater communication emulation system based on the LabVIEW and MATLAB software and real acoustic transducer. In the emulation system, LabVIEW calls MATLAB script to achieve algorithm implementation, and then uses DAQmx to send and receive data through the acquisition card. The proposed system supports a variety of modulation and demodulation methods, such as multiple frequency-shift-keying(MFSK), multi-carrier frequency-shift-keying(MCFSK), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM), etc. In addition, in order to detect frame efficiently, we propose a light-weight frame synchronous algorithm. To verify the function of the systems, lake test and sea test are conducted for different algorithms.

Keywords

• Underwater acoustic communication
• LabVIEW
• MATLAB
• suitable platform