A Low Complexity Channel Emulator for Underwater Acoustic Communications

This paper presents a low-complexity channel emu-lator for underwater acoustic communications. The proposed em-ulator utilizes Bellhop's underwater acoustic toolbox to calculate the channel response at the beginning and end of each stationary time interval. It also takes into account the motion of the transmitter and receiver to compute the Doppler factor. It applies a low-complexity resampling method for each path to generate the channel output signals during each stationary interval. This emulator assumes that the channel is doubly selective. To verify the emulator, a software-defined radio platform is used for implementation. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed emulator achieves higher accuracy and much lower complexity than the existing underwater channel emulator based on Waymark.