Abstract:

To improve the data rate of underwater acoustic frequency-hopped communications, frequency hopping is applied to different orders of fractional Fourier domain (FrFD), to enable non-intrusive, bandwidth-limited acoustic communications. An FrFD frequency-hopped communication method based on chirp modulation, namely multiple chirp shift keying-FrFD hopping (MCSK-FrFDH), is proposed for underwater acoustic channels. Validated by both simulations and experimental results, this method can reach a bandwidth efficiency twice more than conventional frequency-hopped methods with the same data rate and anti-multipath capability, suggesting that the proposed method achieves a better performance than the traditional frequencyhopped communication in underwater acoustic communication channels. Results also show that in practical scenarios, the MCSKFrFDH system with longer symbol length performs better at the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), while the system with larger frequency sweeping range performs better at a high SNR.