Multipath modeling for acoustic communication

The major limitation to reliable, high-rate underwater acoustic communication arises from the presence of multipath. Multipath conditions vary depending on sea state, type of bottom, depth, source-hydrophone configuration and their respective beam patterns. In this paper, a simple model for multipath prediction is described. The existence of a direct signal path is assumed and multipath is treated as a non-coherent noise. The model allows evaluation of the multipath interference for a particular channel and enables the calculation of the improvement obtainable through multipath suppression, either by frequency diversity or narrow-beam transmission.