This paper investigates the performance of vertical underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems in the presence of air bubbles and temperature gradients. We consider a generalized UWOC channel model that contains $N$ layers, each having the same distribution but with different parameters to consider the vertically inhomogeneous nature of the underwater environment. To capture the effects of air bubbles and temperature gradients on channel statistics, we model each layer with a mixture exponential-generalized Gamma distribution. A closed-form probability density function (PDF) is presented for the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio. Based on the PDF, we derive the average bit-error-rate (BER) and the ergodic capacity. Moreover, we provide asymptotic BER and ergodic capacity results in simple forms. The performance and behavior of vertical UWOC systems are thoroughly analyzed, and all the derived expressions are verified via Monte Carlo simulations.

The secrecy performance is analyzed for a two-hop mixed radio frequency (RF)/underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) system using a decode-and-forward (DF) relay. All RF and UWOC links are modeled by the α-μ and exponential-generalized Gamma distributions, respectively. We first derive the expressions of a lower bound of secrecy outage probability in closed-form, and these expressions are used to derive asymptotic expressions in simple functions at high signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, based on the asymptotic expressions, we can numerically determine a suboptimal transmit power for a wide variety of RF and UWOC channel conditions. All analyses are validated using Monte Carlo simulation.

Underwater acoustic communications are challenging because channels are complex, and acoustic waves when propagating in the ocean are subjected to a variety of interferences, such as noise, reflections, scattering and so on. Spread spectrum technique thus has been widely used in underwater acoustic communications for its strong anti-interference ability and good confidentiality. Underwater acoustic channels are typical coherent multipath channels, in which the inter-symbol interference seriously affects the performance of underwater acoustic communications. Time-reversal mirror technique utilizes this physical characteristic of underwater acoustic channels to restrain the inter-symbol interference by reconstructing multipath signals and reduce the influence of channel fading by spatial focusing. This paper presents an M-ary cyclic shift keying spread spectrum underwater acoustic communication scheme based on the virtual time-reversal mirror. Compared to the traditional spread spectrum techniques, this method is more robust, for it uses the M-ary cyclic shift keying spread spectrum to improve the communication rate and uses the virtual time-reversal mirror to ensure a low bit error rate. The performance of this method is verified by simulations and pool experiments.

Time synchronization is the foundation of cooperative work among nodes of underwater sensor networks; it takes a critical role in the research and application of underwater sensor networks. Although numerous time synchronization protocols have been proposed for terrestrial wireless sensor networks, they cannot be directly applied to underwater sensor networks. This is because most of them typically assume that the propagation delay among sensor nodes is negligible, which is not the case in underwater sensor networks. Time synchronization is mainly affected by a long propagation delay among sensor nodes due to the low propagation speed of acoustic signals. Furthermore, sensor nodes in underwater tend to experience some degree of mobility due to wind or ocean current, or some other nodes are on self-propelled vehicles, such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). In this paper, we propose a Doppler-enhanced time synchronization scheme for mobile underwater sensor networks, called DE-Sync. Our new scheme considers the effect of the clock skew during the process of estimating the Doppler scale factor and directly substitutes the Doppler scale factor into linear regression to achieve the estimation of the clock skew and offset. Simulation results show that DE-Sync outperforms existing time synchronization protocols in both accuracy and energy efficiency.

This letter proposes a correlation detection algorithm based on multi-channelization. The existing method has poor performance for detecting a time-varying signal with a low signal-to-noise ratio(SNR). To overcome this problem, we use the method of correlation summation after multi-channelization. According to the difference between the correlation between signals and noise in the received data, the single-channel data is converted into multi-channel data by a multi-channelization method without changing the signals. Then the noise is filtered by correlation calculation of multi-channel data, which can improve the detection probability of signals under low SNR. Based on the theory of multi-channelization, we propose two different methods to detect signals. To better reflect the performance of the algorithm, we compared several classical signal detection methods, such as energy detection (ED), correlation detection (CD), and cyclic spectrum detection (CSD). Simulation analysis and experimental results show that the multi-channelization correlation detection algorithm has better detection performance when the SNR is low.

A dolphin's biosonar may effectively discriminate subtle differences among targets. In order to investigate the possible physical mechanism of target discrimination, in this study, a finite element model excited by a biomimetic click pulse was proposed. The acoustic scattering field and stress distribution of a stainless steel shell were simulated. The biomimetic click experiments were then conducted to verify the theoretical predictions in an anechoic tank. The experimental results showed a good agreement with the model simulations. Furthermore, the elastic time-frequency features of three cylindrical shells with different wall thickness were obtained using a fractional Fourier transform filter to eliminate specular reflection and cross-term interference. To compare discrimination capacity of the time-frequency features with and without the specular reflection, a time-frequency correlator was applied to calculate the correlation coefficient between different shells. The results indicated that the time-frequency features can be represented in high resolution with less cross-term interference, and these features without specular reflection showed a good capacity to discriminate the shells with different wall thickness.