Abstract
Wireless transmissions in water are mostly carried out via long-range (but low-rate) underwater acoustic communications, or short-range (but high-rate) underwater optical communications. In this paper, we are interested in finding out whether a statistical relationship exists between underwater acoustics and optics. Besides the theoretical interest of such a relationship, predicting the quality of the optical link through acoustics is also relevant in the context of a multimodal system with both acoustics and optics. Our study is based on a large data set acquired during the NATO ALOMEX 2015 expedition. During this experiment, we simultaneously measured several characteristics of the acoustic and optical links at multiple locations, reflecting a diversity of sea environments. Our results show a strong correlation between the properties of the acoustic link and the reliability of optical communications. This correlation makes it possible to predict the state of the underwater optical link at a certain depth and range. Due to the complexity of the acoustic and optical channels, we could not find the source of this correlation. This paper is, therefore, aimed to stimulate a theoretical study of the mutual properties of underwater acoustic and optical communication links. For reproducibility, we share the processed data from the experiment.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 8037-8051 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2017 IEEE.
Keywords
- Classification
- Machine learning
- Multimodal systems
- Prediction
- Sea experiment
- Support vector machine
- Underwater acoustic communications
- Underwater optical communications
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Science Applications
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Applied Mathematics