Enabling High-speed Ultrasound Communication Through Thin Plates by Reverberation Suppression

• In all digital communications, knowledge of the propagation channel between the transmitter and the receiver is essential. For transmitting of data through solid bodies, such as metal plates, pipe walls, etc., ultrasound is a viable alternative to radio communication and wired transmission. In ultrasound communication, the channel consists of two parts, the combined response of the transducers used as transmitter and receiver, and the impulse response of the propagation medium itself. For a thin plate with parallel surfaces, this results in a reverberating channel that significantly reduces the achievable bitrate if not handled properly. In this paper we show with simulations how the bit-error rate in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) communications, is affected by the reverberating nature of the plate, and how this can be overcome by the introduction of a channel shortening filter placed in front of the OFDM conventional receiver. The results show that this significantly reduces the bit-error rate, especially for thin plates. If the reverberations instead were to be compensated by the conventional channel equalization method in OFDM, we show that for the example in the simulations, the bitrate would drop by almost 25 %, from about 3.9 Mbit/s to about 2.9 Mbit/s.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Signalbehandling (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Signal Processing (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Telekommunikation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Telecommunications (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Ultrasound communication

OFDM

Channel shortening

Signalbehandling

Signal Processing

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)