SignalEx: Relating the Channel to Modem Performance

The rapid international development of the mobile phone business has led to significant advances in communications engineering. However, the experience base for underwater acoustic communications is much more limited. Meanwhile, the ocean channel has unique characteristics, so that one cannot assume radio modulation schemes are suitable for acoustic communications in the ocean (and vice versa). Users of acoustic modems in the ocean often find that a system that worked well in one area performs badly or not at all in a new site. In general, the acomms community does not have a capability to reliably predict network performance in new sites. The objective of the SignalEx tests is address this problem by developing insights about how different environmental conditions affect different signaling schemes.