Abstract

Abstract For many underwater acoustic applications, the source and receiver systems carry a single transducer antenna. The lack of spatial diversity makes it difficult to carry out phase coherent communications. Using distributed nodes of an underwater acoustic network, this paper address phase coherent underwater acoustic communications using source diversity. Using at-sea data, it is shown that two sources are sufficient to minimize the bit error rate. This is to be contrasted with previous work using synthetic aperture requiring multiple repeated transmissions.