Time reversal and spatial diversity: issues in a time varying geometry test

Abstract. Underwater acoustic communications in waveguides is known to be prone to severe multipath, which strongly limits practical transmission rates with actual channel equalization tech-niques. The time reversal principle uses the ocean waveguide response to a basic pulse shape to matched filter the received data sequence. Assuming the ocean response to be a version of the actual pulse shape ocean response corrupted by additive noise, the matched filter output remains a sum of four terms from which only one has the required data sequence in usable form. This paper analysis the ability of such a peculiar matched filter to reject the unwanted terms both with fixed and time-varying source-receiver geometries. One particular parameter with practical interest is the sensitivity of the matched filter performance to a change of the source-receiver range during the processing that induces a mismatch limiting factor. Simulation examples in realistic situations and results obtained with real data, collected during the INTIFANTE’00 sea trial, illustrate the theoretical assertions