An integrated waveform design method for underwater acoustic detection and communication

Abstract In recent years, the integrated system for underwater detection and communication (ISUDC) has become one of the important research directions. At present, the efficiency of the existing shared signals carrying communication information is low, and the synchronization performance needs to be further improved. So, this paper proposes an integrated waveform design scheme for ISUDC based on the carrier with good detection performance and binary phase shift differential keying (DBPSK). In this scheme, the signal with better underwater detection performance (e.g. Linear Frequency Modulation, LFM) is selected as the carrier, and DBPSK is used as the modulation mode to modulate the communication symbols into the carrier. However, the correlation of the detection signal will be destroyed. Thus, the down‐frequency detection signal (e.g. ngLFM) is superimposed into the signal to form a shared signal (LFM‐DBPSK‐ng, LDN). The detection performance, synchronization performance and communication performance of the shared signal are analyzed by ambiguity function, cross‐correlation and BER, respectively. In addition, according to the proposed scheme, the shared signal HFM‐DBPSK‐ng (HDN) is generated by using HFM as carrier. The comparative simulation experiments are carried out with the existing LFM‐BPSK signals. Experiments show that both LDN and HDN have better performance compared to the other shared signals, which proves the effectiveness of the integrated waveform design scheme for ISUDC proposed in this paper.