Interpreting Different Features of Shallow Water Acoustic Channels Using Braid Manifolds

We explore different representations of the shallow water acoustic channel using braid manifolds with the objective of interpreting diverse channel phenomena. We propose a novel channel model based on braid manifolds that have the natural ability to detect topologically connected channel features across diverse channel representations in time, delay and their spectral components. We demonstrate the need for different representation domains based on Iocalization goals of channel features across time, frequency and varying degrees of channel sparsity. We also provide a comparison between braid interpretations of the time-varying shallow water acoustic channel across different channel representations based on experimental field data collected in the SPACE08 experiment.