FLUMO: FLexible Underwater MOdem

The last years have seen a growing interest in underwater acoustic communications because of its applications in marine research, oceanography, marine commercial operations, the offshore oil industry and defense. High-speed communication in the underwater acoustic channel has been challenging because of limited bandwidth, extended multipath, refractive properties of the medium, severe fading, rapid time variation and large Doppler shifts. In this paper, we show an implementation of a flexible Software-Defined Acoustic (SDA) underwater modem, where modulation parameters are completely tunable to optimize performance. In particular, we develop the system architecture following two key ideas. …