Wideband multichannel time-reversal processing for acoustic communications in highly reverberant environments

The development of multichannel time-reversal (T/R) processing techniques continues to progress rapidly especially when the need to communicate in a reverberant environment is critical. The underlying T/R concept is based on time-reversing the Green’s function characterizing the uncertain communications channel mitigating the deleterious dispersion and multipath effects. In this paper, attention is focused on two major objectives: (1) wideband communications leading to a time-reference modulation technique; and (2) multichannel acoustic communications in two waveguides: a stairwell and building corridors with many obstructions, multipath returns, severe background noise, disturbances, and long propagation paths (∼180ft) including disruptions (bends). It is shown that T/R receivers are easily extended to wideband designs. Acoustic information signals are transmitted with an eight-element array to two receivers with a significant loss in signal levels due to the propagation environment. The results of the new wideband T/R processor and modulation scheme demonstrate that the overall performance for both high (24-bit) and low (1-bit) bit level analog-to-digital converter designs. These results are validated by performing proof-of-principle acoustic communications experiments in air. It is shown that the resulting T/R receivers are capable of extracting the transmitted coded sequence from noisy microphone array measurements with zero-bit error.