High data rate acoustic modem for underwater aplications

The development of an underwater wireless communication systems is becoming a research and a technological priority due to the increasing demand for exploring the potential of oceans in fields such as pharmaceutics, oil, minerals, environmental and biodiversity. However, underwater wireless communications still fail to ensure high data-rate connections which support real time applications. In this work a low power high data-rate acoustic modem is presented, based on a piezoelectric poly (vinylidene fluoride) polymer as a transducer and a Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that can be programmed to work with different types of modulations. The system has been validated by the implementation of a full duplex point-to-point communication at 1 Mbps using On-Off Keying (OOK) modulation with a 1 MHz single carrier and it represents a major advance in the state of the art and a breakthrough in underwater acoustic communications, being the first to show the possibility to achieve data rates up to 1Mbps. It was successfully tested with a 1 Mbps rate, achieving a 3×10^-3 Bit Error Rate (BER) using just 1.4 μW of power consumption per bit.