Design and implementation of a BPSK acoustic modem for underwater communication

This paper presents the design and implementation of an acoustic modem including transducer, analog transceiver and digital system. The digital system is responsible for signal processing and control and is the key part of the modem. We design the digital system targeting on FPGA for its power and speed superiority, and choose BPSK as the modulation scheme. Matlab simulation results and hardware software coverification on Xilinx Virtex5 FPGA demonstrate that the proposed BPSK modem works correctly and the resource utilization of the digital system on FPGA is provided in the paper. In conclusion, a BPSK acoustic modem is developed and can be widely used in underwater sensor networks.