Multilayered Intelligent Reflecting Surface for Long-Range Underwater Acoustic Communication

This article introduces a multilayered acoustic reconfigurable intelligent surface (ML-ARIS) architecture designed for the next generation of underwater communications. ML-ARIS incorporates multiple layers of piezoelectric material in each acoustic reflector, with the load impedance of each layer independently adjustable via a control circuit. This design increases the flexibility in generating reflected signals with desired amplitudes and orthogonal phases, enabling passive in-phase and quadrature (IQ) modulation using a single acoustic reflector. Such a feature enables precise beam steering, enhancing sound levels in targeted directions while minimizing interference in surrounding environments. Extensive simulations and tank experiments were conducted to verify the feasibility of ML-ARIS. The experimental results indicate that implementing IQ modulation with a multilayer structure is indeed practical in real-world scenarios, making it possible to use a single reflection unit to generate reflected waves with high-resolution amplitudes and phases.

Underwater Acoustic Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: from Principle to Practice

This article explores the potential of underwater acoustic reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (UA-RIS) for facilitating long-range and eco-friendly communication in marine environments. Unlike radio frequency-based RIS (RF-RIS), which have been extensively investigated in terrestrial contexts, UA-RIS is an emerging field of study. The distinct characteristics of acoustic waves, including their slow propagation speed and potential for noise pollution affecting marine life, necessitate a fundamentally different approach to the architecture and design principles of UA-RIS compared to RF-RIS. Currently, there is a scarcity of real systems and experimental data to validate the feasibility of UA-RIS in practical applications. To fill this gap, this article presents field tests conducted with a prototype UA-RIS consisting of 24 acoustic elements. The results demonstrate that the developed prototype can effectively reflect acoustic waves to any specified directions through passive beamforming, thereby substantially extending the range and data rate of underwater communication systems.

Multi-Layered Recursive Least Squares for Time-Varying System Identification

Traditional recursive least square (RLS) adaptive filtering is widely used to estimate the impulse responses (IR) of an unknown system. Nevertheless, the RLS estimator shows poor performance when tracking rapidly time-varying systems. In this paper, we propose a multi-layered RLS (m-RLS) estimator to address this concern. The m-RLS estimator is composed of multiple RLS estimators, each of which is employed to estimate and eliminate the misadjustment of the previous layer. It is shown that the mean square error (MSE) of the m-RLS estimate can be minimized by selecting the optimum number of layers. We provide a method to determine the optimum number of layers. A low-complexity implementation of m-RLS is discussed and it is indicated that the complexity order of the proposed estimator can be reduced to O(M), where M is the IR length. In addition, by performing simulations, we show that m-RLS outperforms the classic RLS and the RLS methods with a variable forgetting factor.

An Adaptive Receiver for Underwater Acoustic Full-Duplex Communication with Joint Tracking of the Remote and Self-Interference Channels

Full-duplex (FD) communication is a promising candidate to address the data rate limitations in underwater acoustic (UWA) channels. Because of transmission at the same time and on the same frequency band, the signal from the local transmitter creates self-interference (SI) that contaminates the signal from the remote transmitter. At the local receiver, channel state information for both the SI and remote channels is required to remove the SI and equalize the SI-free signal, respectively. However, because of the rapid time-variations of the UWA environment, real-time tracking of the channels is necessary. In this paper, we propose a receiver for UWA-FD communication in which the variations of the SI and remote channels are jointly tracked by using a recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm fed by feedback from the previously detected data symbols. Because of the joint channel estimation, SI cancellation is more successful compared to UWA-FD receivers with separate channel estimators. In addition, due to providing a real-time channel tracking without the need for frequent training sequences, the bandwidth efficiency is preserved in the proposed receiver.