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- Acoustic oceanographic buoy data report Makai Ex 2005Publication . Jesus, S. M.; Silva, A.; Zabel, F.It is now well accepted in the underwater acoustic scientific community that below, say, 1 kHz acoustic propagation models are accurate enough to be able to predict the received acoustic field up to the point of allowing precise and reliable source tracking in range and depth with only limited environmental information. This results from a large number of studies both theoretical and with real data, carried out in the last 20 years. With the event of underwater communications and the necessity to increase the signal bandwidth for allowing higher communication rates, the frequency band of interest was raised to above 10 kHz. In this frequency band the detailed knowledge of the environment - acoustic signal interplay is reduced. The purpose of the MakaiEx sea trial is to acquire data in a complete range of frequencies from 500 Hz up to 50 kHz, for a variety of applications ranging from high-frequency tomography, coherent SISO and MIMO applications, vector - sensor, active and passive sonar, etc...The MakaiEx sea trial, that took place off Kauai I. from 15 September - 2 October, involved a large number of teams both from government and international laboratories, universities and private companies, from various countries. Each team focused on its specific set of objectives in relation with its equipment or scientific interest. The team from the University of Algarve (UALg) focused on the data acquired by their receiving Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy - version 2 (AOB2) during six deployments in the period 15 - 27 September. This report describes the AOB2 data set as well as all the related environmental and geometrical data relative to the AOB2 deployments. The material described herein represents a valuable data set for supporting the research objectives of projects NUACE1, namely to fulfill NUACE’s task 3 and 4 and RADAR2, namely its tasks 2 and 3 devoted to the developement and testing of a field of sonobuoys.
- The TV-APM interface: a web service for collaborative modelingPublication . Rodríguez, O. C.; Silva, A.; Zabel, F.; Jesus, S. M.Current development of Internet access, together with available zero-cost Open Source applications (like, for instance, PHP, Python, etc.) can be integrated in order to minimize the constrains induced by the geographical separation of international centers, which collaborate in a given project. The advantage of such approach lies in the sharing of common analysis methods, without particular constrains to specific directions of analysis. The discussion presented in this paper describes the Time Variable Acoustic Propagation Model (TV-APM) web interface, which was created as a collaborative service of acoustic modeling for the participants of the PHITOM and UAN projects. This paper describes the general architecture of the interface, its current shortcomings and advantages, and presents a set of modeling results for short range acoustic propagation, which accounts for source–array and sea surface motion.
- Linking acoustic communications and network performance. Integration and experimentation of an underwater acoustic networkPublication . Caiti, A.; Grythe, K.; Hovem, J. M.; Jesus, S. M.; Lie, A.; Munafò, Andrea; Reinen, Tor Arne; Silva, A.; Zabel, F.Underwater acoustic networks (UANs) are an emerging technology for a number of oceanic applications, ranging from oceanographic data collection to surveillance applications. However, their reliable usage in the field is still an open research problem, due to the challenges posed by the oceanic environment. The UAN project, a European-Union-funded initiative, moved along these lines, and it was one of the first cases of successful deployment of a mobile underwater sensor network integrated within a wide-area network, which included above water and underwater sensors. This contribution, together with a description of the underwater network, aims at evaluating the communication performance, and correlating the variation of the acoustic channel to the behavior of the entire network stack. Results are given based on the data collected during the UAN11 (May 2011, Trondheim Fjord area, Norway) sea trial. During the experimental activities, the network was in operation for five continuous days and was composed of up to four Fixed NOdes (FNOs), two autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and one mobile node mounted on the supporting research vessel. Results from the experimentation at sea are reported in terms of channel impulse response (CIR) and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) as measured by the acoustic modems during the sea tests. The performance of the upper network levels is measured in terms of round trip time (RTT) and probability of packet loss (PL). The analysis shows how the communication performance was dominated by variations in signal-to-noise ratio, and how this impacted the behavior of the whole network. Qualitative explanation of communication performance variations can be accounted, at least in the UAN11 experiment, by standard computation of the CIR and transmission loss estimate.
- TRA - Transmit Receive Array (project plan version 2)Publication . Zabel, F.; Martins, C.; Jesus, S. M.; Silva, A.This report describes an update to the project plan for the development of a Transmit Receive Array (TRA). This system is under development for the Underwater Acoustic Barriers (UAB) project which aims at studying, developing and testing in the field the concept of building an underwater acoustic barrier for detecting intruders in a given area.
- Underwater communications using virtual time reversal in a variable geometry channelPublication . Silva, A.; Jesus, S. M.Field experiments using Time-Reversal Mirror( TRM) techniques have shown that the underwater acoustic channel presents a longer stability than it was previously anticipated. Applying such techniques to underwater communications requires that, either the emitted signals are previously ltered by time-reversed replicas of the channel impulse response or that a probe-signal should be transmitted ahead of the data-signal for post channel ltering. In the former case, the time-reversed ltered message is expected to be undone by the actual acoustic channel between the array and the receiver, while in the later, the undoing of the multipath is performed electronically inside the computer and is therefore termed as virtual Time Reversal Mirror(vTRM). The main issues being addressed in recent literature deal with channel stability, focus width and the required array aperture for obtaining reasonable temporal and/or spatial focusing. This paper focus essentially in two practical aspects, generally not addressed: one is to demonstrate the potential application of the vTRM approach to undo the severe intersymbol interference in a real variable geometry channel scenario and, the other, is the importance of optimization of the probe-signal time window length in a real application.
- The acoustic oceanographic buoy. A light acoustic data acquisition systemPublication . Soares, C.; Zabel, F.; Martins, C.; Silva, A.; Jesus, S. M.The Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy (AOB) is a light acoustic receiving device that incorporates acoustic and non-acoustic signals received in various channels along a vertical line array that provide oceanographic and environment measurements all of which are uniquely GPS time referenced. The physical characteristics of the AOB, in terms of size, weight and autonomy, will tend to those of a standard sonobuoy with, however, the capabilities: of local data storage, dedicated signal-processing, GPS self localizing, real-time monitoring and online data transmission.
- Acoustic oceanographic buoy (version 1)Publication . Silva, A.; Martins, C.; Jesus, S. M.One of the known impairements in the application of ocean acoustic tomography in operational scenarios has been the size, weight and difficulty of operation of actual ocean going equipment, such as hydrophone arrays and acoustic sources. The Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy - AOB is meant to be, at its final stage, an easy to deploy and easy to maintain autonomous vertical array that puts together in a single system acoustic and non-acoustic sensors, self-storing of geotime and GPS referred data, on the buoy preprocessing capabilities and network seamless integrability and data online transfer via a wireless lan high speed link. These capabilities make the AOB a versatile system for a variety of applications such as ocean tomography, underwater communications, rapid environmental assessment (REA), passive and multistatic sonar and underwater target tracking. The AOB version 1 described in this report was developed between 2003 and 2004 and tested at sea during the MREA’03 and MREA’04 sea trials.
- Arrival-based equalizer for underwater communication systemsPublication . Ijaz, S.; Silva, A.; Jesus, S. M.One of the challenges in the present underwater acoustic communication systems is to combat the underwater channel effects which results in time and frequency spreading of the transmitted signal. The time spreading is caused by the multipath effect while the frequency spreading is due to the time variability of the underwater channel. The passive Time Reversal (pTR) equalizer has been used in underwater communications because of its time focusing property which minimizes the time spreading effect of the underwater channel. In order to compensate for the frequency spreading effect, an improved version of pTR was proposed, called Frequency shift passive time reversal (FSpTR). FSpTR tries to compensate for the frequency spreading by applying a frequency shift in the estimated channel impulse response (IR). In the multipath environment, multiple replicas of the transmitted signal reaches the receiver through different paths where each path is affected differently by environmental variations. In such cases, a single frequency shift fails to compensate for the environmental variations on each path, resulting in degradation in the performance. In this paper, an arrival-based equalizer is proposed to compensate for the environmental variations on each path. The concept of beamforming is integrated with FSpTR equalizer, in this paper, to compensate each arrival separately for the environmental variations. The proposed equalizer is tested with the real data and the results showed that the proposed approach outperforms pTR and FSpTR equalizers and provides a mean MSE gain of 4.9 dB and 4.2 dB respectively.
- AOB - an easily deployable, reconfigurable and multifunctional acoustic-oceanographic systemPublication . Jesus, S. M.; Soares, C.; Silva, A.; Hermand, J.-P.; Coelho, E.The concept of an easy to use and easy to deploy ocean acoustic tomographic OAT system is presented. The system is composed of a network of buoys and a data inversion online processor. This study concerns the individual node of that network—the acoustic-oceanographic buoy AOB —the data inversion technique and the testing of the system at sea. The AOB is a lightweight surface buoy with a vertical array of acoustic and temperature sensors to be hand deployed in a free-drifting configuration from a small boat. The data are locally stored and transmitted online to a remote station for processing and monitoring. Data inversion is based on a broadband matched-field tomography technique where known and unknown parameters are simultaneously searched for focalization . In situ recorded temperature data serve for algorithm initialization and calibration. The AOB was successfully deployed in several consecutive days during two rapid environmental assessment sea trials in 2003 Mediterranean and 2004 Atlantic . Data collected at sea also show that the AOB can be reconfigured as a receiving array for underwater coherent communications in the band up to 15 kHz.
- Acoustic maritime rapid environmental assessment 2004 during the MREA'04 sea trialPublication . Jesus, S. M.; Soares, C.; Felisberto, P.; Silva, A.; Farinha, L.; Martins, C.Environmental inversion of acoustic signals for bottom and water column properties is being proposed in the literature as an interesting concept for complementing direct hydrographic and oceanographic measurements for Rapid Environmental Assessment (REA). The acoustic contribution to REA can be cast as the result of the inversion of ocean acoustic properties to be assimilated into ocean circulation models specifically tailored and calibrated to the scale of the area under observation. Traditional ocean tomography systems and methods for their requirements of long and well populated receiving arrays and precise knowledge of the source/receiver geometries are not well adapted to operational Acoustic REA (AREA). The Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy (AOB) was proposed as an innovative concept that responds to the operational requirements of AREA. That concept includes the development of water column and geo-acoustic inversion methods being able to retrieve environmental true properties from signals received on a drifting network of acoustic-oceanographic sensors - the AOBs. An AOB prototype and a preliminary version of the inversion code, was tested at sea during the Maritime Rapid Environmental Assessment 2003 (MREA’03) sea trial and was reported in [1]. On a separate register it should be noted that the characterization of the environment between the source and the receiver also contributes to the identification of the acoustic channel response and therefore provides a basis for fulfilling the objectives of project NUACE1. The present report describes the data sets and results gathered during the MREA’04 sea trial that took place from 29 March to 19 April 2004 off the west coast of Portugal, south of Lisboa (Portugal), with the objectives of testing an improved version of the individual AOB and its functionality in a simple network. The acoustic part of the experiment lasted for four days between April 7 and April 10, 2004 and involved the transmission and reception of pre-coded signals along range-dependent and range-independent acoustic tracks.