An underwater acoustic communications scheme with inherent scale diversity for multiple users

Wideband underwater acoustic communication channels can cause undesirable multipath and Doppler scaling distortions to propagating acoustic signals. In this paper, we propose to exploit a time-scale canonical representation for wideband time-varying channels to achieve joint multipath-scale diversity. We design a signaling scheme with hyperbolic time-frequency signatures that is matched to the underwater acoustic environment to achieve scale diversity. The signaling scheme, combined with code-division multiple-access, is extended to multiple user transmission to improve multiuser detection performance, as demonstrated with simulations.