Array processing techniques for frequency hopping multiple frequency shift keying long-range communications

Underwater communication is an important component of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) operations. Communicating underwater is limited to very low communication rates without the use of processing techniques that mitigate the influence of the acoustic channel. This thesis develops array processing techniques for frequency hopping and multiple frequency shift keying to achieve long range, reliable high speed communications. The thesis makes the comparison between two techniques for calculating beamforming coefficients: a coherent Least Mean Square (LMS) adaptive filter and a non-coherent LMS. An Equal Gain Combiner (EGC) and a Maximum Likelihood (ML) were used to determine the performance of the coherent and non-coherent LMS. The results show that by using the coherent LMS, the ML or the EGC, communications at rates of 493 bit per second (bps) and 370bps can be achieved with no frame error at 5km in 40 feet of water using 16.3kHz of bandwidth centered at 25kHz.