Performance of the WHOI Acoustic Modem in Shallow Water Constrained Environments

During a set of acoustic field experiments in the Fall River Harbor area of Massachusetts, data were collected to characterize underwater acoustic conditions for communications. A high-resolution bathymetric survey of the area was performed to create a gridded bathymetric product of the seafloor that was used for 3D acoustic propagation simulations in the given channel. The results were convolved with the actual transmitted waveforms to simulate received modem signals. In this paper, acoustic modem performance is compared with the modeled performance to examine the feasibility of the model for predicting acoustic performance based on understanding key system variables.