The objective of this study is to evaluate Grassmannian constellations combined with a spread spectrum multiple access scheme for underwater acoustic mobile multiple access communication systems. These communication systems enable the coordination of a fleet of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) from a surface or bottom control unit, e.g., a boat. Due to its robustness against phase rotation, the demodulator of Grassmannian constellations uses non-coherent detection, and the main advantage of such modulation lies in the spectrum efficiency gain with respect to conventional differential modulation. The communication system under study in this paper consists of (i), at the transmitter side, a Grassmannian modulation used in an orthogonal spread spectrum multiple access scheme called Multiuser Hyperbolic Frequency Modulation (MU-HFM) and (ii), at the receiver side, a non-coherent array decoder. The modulation and demodulation are presented as well as the considered spreading sequences. Finally, performances of the proposed transmission scheme are evaluated over replayed underwater acoustic channel responses collected at sea by a multi-sensor acoustic acquisition system.
Keywords: Grassmannian modulation; multiple access; spread spectrum communication; underwater communications.