Performance Comparison of RAKE and SIC/RAKE Receivers for Multiuser Underwater Acoustic Communication Applications

Recently, multiuser underwater communication become a research area receiving rising attention by both industrials and researchers. Direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) techniques seem to have gained particular attention since it provide improved performance on time varying multipath channels, through the use of coherent-detection based receivers, and allow multiple access communications. In this paper a performance comparison of two code division multiple access based receivers, a RAKE and a SIC/RAKE, for an underwater acoustic communication network modems is proposed. The developed system is designed for time varying multipath channels in the presence of multiple access interference (MAI), to achieve low probability of intercept (LPI). The performances of the proposed receivers are compared based on computer simulations.