Double-differential coded M-ary direct sequence spread spectrum for mobile underwater acoustic communication system

Abstract This paper presents a double-differential coded M-ary direct sequence spread spectrum (DD-MSS) underwater acoustic communication system to overcome problems of both low signal-to-noise ratio and severe Doppler effect. The system is very efficient in the challenging band-limited underwater acoustic channel and has many applications, particularly in which the transmitter and the receiver are mobile. Given that the bit error rate (BER) performance is unaffected, this scheme results in a significant improvement in the data rate compared to direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) communication systems. The MSS system uses M pseudo-random codes to represent k bits of information and offers advantages of a higher spectral efficiency and a lower energy consumption than the DSSS system. Both simulations and experiments are performed, and the results are discussed in the paper for the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme. The results demonstrate a better BER performance using the DD-MSS in a mobile environment.