Shipborne Underwater Acoustic Communication System and Sea Trials with Submersible Shenhai Yongshi

The Shipborne acoustic communication system of the submersible Shenhai Yongshi works in vertical, horizontal and slant channels according to the relative positions. For ease of use, an array combined by a vertical-cone directional transducer and a horizontal-toroid one is installed on the mothership. Improved techniques are proposed to combat adverse channel conditions, such as frequency selectivity, non-stationary ship noise, and Doppler effects of the platform’s nonlinear movement. For coherent modulation, a turbo-coded single-carrier scheme is used. In the receiver, the sparse decision-directed Normalized Least-Mean-Square soft equalizer automatically adjusts the tap pattern and weights according to the multipath structure, the two receivers’ asymmetry, the signal’s frequency selectivity and the noise’s spectrum fluctuation. The use of turbo code in turbo equalization significantly suppresses the error floor and decreases the equalizer’s iteration times, which is verified by both the extrinsic information transfer charts and bit-error-rate performance. For noncoherent modulation, a concatenated error correction scheme of nonbinary convolutional code and Hadamard code is adopted to utilize full frequency diversity. Robust and lowcomplexity synchronization techniques in the time and Doppler domains are proposed. Sea trials with the submersible to a maximum depth of over 4500 m show that the shipborne communication system performs robustly during the adverse conditions. From the ten-thousand communication records in the 28 dives in 2017, the failure rate of the coherent frames and that of the noncoherent packets are both below 10%, where both synchronization errors and decoding errors are taken into account.

Adaptive Tracking for Beam Alignment Between Ship-Borne Digital Phased-Array Antenna and LEO Satellite

In mobile satellite communication networks employing digital beam forming technology,beam alignment imposes great influence on link quality and network efficiency.Owing to complex coupling motion by low earth orbit(LEO)satellite and ship,direction of arrival(DOA)of target satellite varies rapidly and nonlinearly.It then causes difficulty to accurately track the DOA.In this work,an adaptive tracking algorithm is proposed by exploiting advantages of flexible parameter configuration of digital phased-array antenna.The alignment process basically consists of observation and tracking.In the observation stage,two-dimensional(2-D)multiple signal classification(MUSIC)is applied by the ship-borne digital phased-array antenna to estimate beam direction of satellite;in the tracking stage,an extended Kalman filter(EKF)based adaptive tracking is designed to achieve fast and accurate alignment.The proposed adaptive tracking improves performance by adaptively estimating tracking parameters in EKF firstly.The estimation results are then used as feedback to adaptively adjust digital phased-array antenna parameters to improve estimation accuracy of DOA.Simulation results under sea state 5 show that the proposed tracking algorithm improves tracking accuracy and stability over conventional ones.