Underwater acoustic channel modeling in stratified ocean using an improved algorithm of eigen-rays

This paper is concerned with modeling the time-varying UWA channel in Stratified Ocean. The time-varying multipath characteristic of underwater channel imposes strong limitations on acoustic communication transmission. To analyze the characteristic of underwater acoustic channel, a method is proposed based on Rayleigh distribution. Eigen-rays are searched on the basis of the ray theory, that is, eigen-rays are described as a combination of the span model, which is presented here as an efficient and improved algorithm for searching eigen-rays. Compared with other algorithms, this methods can effectively reduce the possibility of missing rays. It then exploits the eigen-ray information of ray tracing to determine the discrete signal transmission paths and add them to random diffusive multi-paths whose amplitude and phase are modeled by Rayleigh and uniform distribution respectively. The result reveals that this method, which is an efficient way to precisely estimate the multipath channel, especially for long distance propagation, has a promising value for engineering application.