Sub-Nyquist underwater communication.

This project explores the application of a recently developed sub-Nyquist sampling technique to echosounding in underwater communication. Echosounding is a type of sonar widely used to navigate, detect, or communicate with objects under the surface of water. An echo-sounder contains a transducer device that sends acoustic pulses into the water. Another part of the echo-sounder, the hydrophone, receives an echo of these pulses after they are reflected by an obstacle in the water. In order to correctly reconstruct the signal, at the receiving end the signal has to be sampled at a rate higher than the Nyquist frequency. This limit has been accepted as a constraint for the cost and performance of echo sounding devices in general. Making use of some recent results in exponential analysis developed at UAtwerpen, one is able to break the Nyquist rate in signal processing. This project investigates the feasibility of these new techniques for analysing echoes sampled at a sub-Nyquist rate. It is an interdisciplinary effort that joins HZS marine engineers, experienced in echo sounding, with researchers, specialised in computational mathematics, from UAntwerpen. The ambition is to achieve better performance in underwater communication at a low cost by using the most current algorithms, bypassing the investment in switching to more expensive hardware.

Keywords:ECHO SOUNDING

Disciplines:Applied mathematics in specific fields, Computer architecture and networks, Distributed computing, Information sciences, Information systems, Programming languages, Scientific computing, Theoretical computer science, Visual computing, Other information and computing sciences, Communications, Communications technology

Project type:Collaboration project