A chaotic spread spectrum system for underwater acoustic communication

Acoustic communication is a key technology to exchange information underwater, which is of great significance to explore marine resources and to marine defense. The underwater acoustic channel is a time-space-frequency varying channel characterized by serious multipath effect, limited frequency band, complex environmental noises and significant Doppler frequency shift phenomenon, which makes underwater acoustic communication with low Bit Error Rate (BER) to be a challenging task. A novel chaotic spread spectrum acoustic communication method with low BER is proposed in this paper. A chaotic signal, generated by a hybrid dynamical system, is used as a spread spectrum sequence at the transmitter end. At the receiver end, a corresponding chaotic matched filter is used to offset the effect of multipath propagation and noise. The proposed method does not require the complicated equalization and modulation–demodulation technologies that are necessary for conventional acoustic communication. Simulation results show that the proposed method has good anti-interference ability and lower BER as compared to other traditional methods.