Design and analysis of a high-rate acoustic link for underwater video transmission

A high bit rate acoustic link for underwater video transmission is examined. Currently, encoding standards support video transmission at bit rates as low as 64 kbps. While this rate is still above the limit of commercially available acoustic modems, prototype acoustic modems based on phase coherent modulation/detection have demonstrated successful transmission at 30 kbps over a deep water channel. The key to bridging the remaining gap between the bit-rate needed for video transmission and that supported by the acoustic channel lies in two approaches: use of efficient image/video compression algorithms and use of high-level bandwidth-efficient modulation methods. An experimental system, based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) and Huffman entropy coding for image compression, and variable rate M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) was implemented. Phase-coherent equalization is accomplished by joint operation of a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) and a second order phase locked loop (PLL). System performance is demonstrated experimentally, using transmission rate of 25000 symbols/sec at a carrier frequency of 75 kHz over a 10 m vertical path.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Ocean Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Pelekanakis, Konstantinos

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Milica Stojanovic.

• Ocean Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33676

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33676