Advancing Underwater Acoustic Communication for Autonomous Distributed Networks via Sparse Channel Sensing, Coding, and Navigation Support

1. Advanced communication techniques of sparse channel sensing and nonbinary LDPC coding. Underwater acoustic channels are naturally sparse, but how to effectively exploit the sparsity is a challenging task. We will investigate the recently developed “compressive sensing” algorithms for sparse channel estimation in the context of multicarrier acoustic communications. On the other hand, channel coding is one integral part of an advanced communication system, and is dispensable in approaching the theoretical limit predicted by the Shannon theory. We will thoroughly investigate nonbinary low-density-parity-check (LDPC) codes, and especially pursue fast encoding and decoding algorithms and practical implementations.