Design and Implementation of a Bidirectional
Acoustic Micro-Modem for Underwater
Communication Systems
Jun-Ho Jeon*, See-Hee Hwangbo*, Hossein Peyvandi†and Sung-Joon Park*
*Department of Electronic Engineering, Gangneung-Wonju National University,
7 Jukheon-gil, Gangneung, Gangwon, Republic of Korea
Email: psj@ieee.org
†Center for Communication Systems, University of Surrey, UK
Abstract— For the devices requiring short and medium range
underwater acoustic communication, acoustic modem should
possess the properties such as low-power consumption, small size,
low cost and high data rate as much as possible. In this paper,
We design and implement an efficient bidirectional micro-modem
to meet the objectives. Also, based on the developed hardware,
indoor and outdoor experiments are executed in a water tank and
a river and the performances are evaluated in terms of received
signal strength, packet loss probability and bit error rate. Since
the modem conforms to the requirements listed above, it could be
utilized for various aquatic applications, e.g., underwater wireless
sensor networks and underwater robots.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Recently, acoustic modem has been emerged as one of the
interesting research topics for the use of underwater appli-
cations based on wireless communication, such as underwater
wireless sensor networks (UWSN) [1], [2], [3] and underwater
robots [4]. In [5], as a preliminary work, the feasibility of real-
time short range acoustic communication was verified with
limited experimental results.
After that, much work on acoustic modem has been done to
achieve the properties of low-power consumption, small size,
low cost, long communication distance and high data rate.
WHOI has developed a variety of modems which support data
rates ranging from 80 to 5400 bps and consume transmitting
power ranging from 50 to 100 watts [6]. The WHOI modem,
typically called as micro-modem from its small size, is com-
prised of multi-layer boards and the dimension of base board
is 114 by 44 millimeters in length and width. Tritech inc. has
been producing a commercial micro-modem whose working
distance amounts to 500 m with the power consumption of 7.2
W, however the data rate of the modem is limited to 40 bps [7].
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based
acoustic modem has been continuously investigated by the
research group at University of Connecticut and they reported
the data rate of 6.4 kbps recently in [8]. In our previous work,
we have implemented an one-way omnidirectional micro-
modem operating at 70 kHz in [9]. The developed modem
can send data with a data rate of 200 bps at a distance of 60
meters, while consuming 2.9 watts.
978-1-4673-0831-1/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE
In this paper, we meliorate our micro-modem by adding
bidirectional feature for efficient two-way communication and
improve the performance of the modem in terms of data rate
and working range through reengineering and optimization
in software and hardware. Functionality and performance of
the developed bidirectional micro-modem are verified and
evaluated through experiments in a river in various ways.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The
design methodology and implemented hardware of our micro-
modem is described in Section II. Aquatic equations for the
analysis of acoustic communication are addressed in Section
III and experimental results are provided in Section IV. Finally,
in Section V, we give a brief summary and comments on
further work of this paper.
II. ACOUSTIC M ICRO -M ODEM
A. Modem Design
Fig. 1 illustrates a block diagram of our bidirectional acous-
tic micro-modem. In order to minimize the size of modem,
binary modulation with noncoherent detection is adopted for
this work. That is, information bearing data generated from a
personal computer (PC) are manipulated at a micro-controller
unit (MCU) as a form which is suitable for packet-based
underwater acoustic communication, and then amplified and
emitted through a water medium. Once acoustic wave is
detected at the transducer of a receiving micro-modem, it is
transformed into electric signal and then converted to digital
signal by amplification and envelope detection. The estimates
of information data are extracted from the MCU and delivered
to a PC.
Unlike the previous version reported in [9], the amplifier at
transmitter is redesigned to handle supply voltage up to 29.6
volts and produce maximum amplified voltage of 300 volts
in peak-to-peak. Also, a duplexer, a kind of signal splitter, is
designed to separate transmitted signal from received signal
in order to prevent howling noise. Therefore, the modem
supports two-way communication with one transducer if a
proper resource allocation scheme for the use of channel such
as time division multiple access is applied.
This is a DRAFT. As such it may not be cited in other works.
The citable Proceedings of the Conference will be published in
IEEE Xplore shortly after the conclusion of the conference.
 MICRO-MODEM

Personal Trans-
MCU Amplifier Duplexer ducer
Computer

Envelope
Filter Amplifier
Detector

Fig. 1. Block diagram of bidirectional micro-modem.

32 mm
40 mm

70 mm
70 mm 55 mm
(a) (b) (c)

Fig. 2. Implemented micro-modem.

TABLE I
H ARDWARE SPECIFICATION OF M ICRO -M ODEM the output voltage at a receiving transducer Vout , which is
given by
Feature Description
Vout · d
MCU Cortex-M3 20 log( ) = T RV + RR − α · d , (1)
Modem size 70 x 40 mm (φ×H) Vin
Resonant frequency 26 kHz or 70 kHz
Transducer size 70 mm (φ) or 34 mm (φ) where T RV and RR are the transmitting response to voltage
Interface SPI, UART and the receiving response of the transducer which are the
Battery 29.6 V, 8.8 AH (Li-ion) characteristic values for a transducer, d is the distance be-
tween transmit and receive transducers, and α represents the
absorption coefficient [11].
B. Hardware Implementation Since α is typically small, the last term in (1) becomes
negligible at several hundreds of meters. Thus, (1) can be
The implemented micro-modem based on the design rewritten as
methodology is shown in Fig. 2 where each subfigure rep-
resents top view, side view and transducer, respectively. The Vout · d ∼
= C (2)
modem is comprised of three-layer boards and a transducer. Vin
The three boards, a digital board embedding a MCU, an analog with a constant C, which means that output voltage is directly
transmission board and an analog reception board, are stacked proportional to input voltage and inversely proportional to
in a cylindrical shape which makes the modem to be easily communication distance within a short range.
installed in a small device like a fish robot. The modem
works with a commercial spherical transducer having omni- B. Packet Loss
directivity and thus it could be utilized for the applications
requiring movement or broadcasting properties. The detailed For an underwater channel having independence among ev-
specification of the modem is described in Table I. ery bits and the bit error probability p, the preamble detection
probability Pd is given by
III. E QUATIONS FOR U NDERWATER ACOUSTIC
C OMMUNICATION 
e
Pd = L Ci (1 − p)L−i pi , (3)
A. Sonar Equations i=0

The sonar equations describe the relationship between sound where L represents the length of preamble and e means the
pressures and input and output voltages at transducers in allowable number of erroneous bits for preamble detection.
underwater acoustic communication [10]. In case of spherical From (3), the packet loss probability Pl becomes
spreading, according to [9], there exists a relationship between
the input voltage applied to a transmitting transducer Vin and Pl = 1 − Pd . (4)
 8

d = 30 m
7

Vout [mV]
4

0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55
Vin [V]

Fig. 4. Input voltage versus output voltage in the river.

0
10
-1
p=10
-2
10
-2
p=10
-3
p=10
-4
Packet loss probability p=10
-4
Fig. 3. Experimental environment for river test. 10 p=10
-5

-6
10
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
A. Experimental Environment 10
-8

In order to verify the performance of the implemented

-10
micro-modem, two kinds of testbeds are prepared. For indoor 10

experiments, a water tank whose dimensions are 2.9 m, 0.75

m and 0.6 m in length, width and height respectively is used 10
-12

as a testbed. Transducers are located in the middle of the
water, facing each other to ensure a line of sight (LOS) signal
component. Fig. 3 shows the place for outdoor experiments
located in the Han River. The width of the river is about five
hundred meters and the maximum depth is about 15 meters. As
usual, the depth of water becomes shallower as approaching
riverside and the flow velocity in murmuring state is normally
under 1 m/s.
Each micro-modem is equipped with an omnidirectional
transducer whose T RV is 147 dB re 1uP a/V at 1 m and
RR is −200 dB re 1V /uP a. The absorption coefficient α
is calculated to 0.0017 dB/m by 70 kHz resonant frequency,
7 ◦ C temperature, pH 7 hydrogen ion concentration and zero
salinity. The data rate is fixed to 1 kbps for experiments.
B. Results
At first, we have investigated the output voltage of the
receiving transducer Vout by varying the input voltage of the
transmitting transducer Vin , with the communication distance
d between two micro-modems fixed to 30 meters in the river.
As expected from (2), it is observed that Vout is nearly directly
proportional to Vin for a given distance as shown in Fig. 4.
Figure 5 is the plot of packet loss probability with respect
to a threshold T for preamble detection. Since 31-bit m-
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Threshold T
Fig. 5. Packet loss probability with respect to T ; L = 31.
sequence is used as preamble for the analysis, e is equal to
(31 − T )/2. It is noted from the analysis that the threshold T
should be carefully selected in order to obtain a target packet
loss probability in a packet-based communication system. For
example, if Pl = 10−4 and p = 10−3 , T should not be 29 or
31.
In order to examine the effect of preamble with the imple-
mented micro-modem, we have conducted experiments in the
water tank. Table II is the packet loss probabilities obtained
by experiments. As expected, Pl is improved by reducing
the threshold T for arbitrary p. The experimental results are
somewhat different from the expected values since only 1000
packets are sent for each experiment. This mismatch could be
resolved with further experiments with larger packets.
Figure 6 shows the bit error rate (BER) with respect to the
distance. According to results, the BER around 10−3 can be
achieved up to 100 meters, but it deteriorates quickly as the
distance exceeds 150 meters. With a transducer having 26 kHz
resonant frequency, error free communication is possible at the
 TABLE II
PACKET LOSS PROBABILITY IN WATER TANK EXPERIMENTS R EFERENCES
[1] I. F. Akyildiz, D. Pompili and T. Melodia, “Underwater acoustic sensor
p = 10−1 p = 10−2 networks: research challenges,” Ad Hoc Networks, vol. 3, no. 3, pp.
analysis experiment analysis experiment 257-279, Mar. 2005.
T = 31 0.9618 0.9240 0.2677 0.3420 [2] J. Heidemann, W. Ye, J. Wills, A. Syed and Y. Li, “Research challenges
T = 29 0.8304 0.5420 0.0383 0.0160 and applications for underwater sensor networking,” in Proc. IEEE
WCNC, Las Vegas, NV, USA, Apr. 2006, pp. 228-235.
T = 27 0.6114 0.1700 0.0036 0.0040
[3] L. Vasilescu, C. Detweiler and D. Rus, “AquaNodes: an underwater
T = 25 0.3761 0.0369 0.0003 0.0000 sensor network,” in Proc. ACM WUWNet, Montreal, Canada, Sep. 2007.
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10
[6] WHOI, http://acomms.whoi.edu
[7] Tritech Inc., http://www.tritech.co.uk
[8] H. Yan, S. Zhou, Z. Shi, J.-H. Cui, L. Wan, J. Huang and H. Zhou,
-2
“DSP implementation of SISO and MIMO OFDM acoustic modems,”
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[9] J.-H. Jeon, T.-H. Won, H. Cho and S.-J. Park, “Implementation of a
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-3
10 [10] Reson Inc., http://www.reson.com
[11] M. Crocker, Encyclopedia of Acoustics, John Wiley & Sons, 1997.

-4
10
0 100 200 300 400 500
Distance [m]

Fig. 6. BER with respect to distance in the river.

distance of 500 meters.

V. C ONCLUSIONS AND F URTHER W ORK

We have designed and implemented a bidirectional acoustic
micro-modem for underwater communication systems. Since
we intended a micro-modem which could be even contained
in a small fish robot, binary modulation with noncoherent
detection scheme was applied to the modem. The developed
modem has a cylindrical shape and its size is only 70 mm in
diameter and 35 mm in height except a transducer. Also, only
one transducer is attached to the modem due to the nature of
bidirectivity, while keeping the whole acoustic modem small.
According to experiments in a river, it was possible to send
data with 1 kbps at 500 meters.
As succeeding work, more experiments in various underwa-
ter environments should be done to deploy the implemented
micro-modem in real applications. Also, the research on
channel coding and equalization and its implementation are
our next step to enhance the performance of our micro-modem.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported in part by Basic Science
Research Programs through the National Research Founda-
tion of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education,
Science and Technology (2012-0004624), and in part by
Korea Research Council for Industrial Science and Technol-
ogy (B551179-10-02-00, Development of Bio Mimetic Robot
System)