572
4, OCTOBER 2001
Signal Detection for Communications in the
Underwater Acoustic Environment
James C. Preisig and Mark P. Johnson
AbstractSignal detection is a critical stage in the implemen-
tation of any effective communications system. The underwater
acoustic environment, particularly in the presence of underwater
vehicles, presents significant challenges to reliable detection
without excessive false alarms. While there is often sufficient
signal-to-noise ratio with respect to stationary broad-band back-
ground noise to permit reliable operation, the presence of strong
event-like interference signals such as narrow-band signals and
impulsive broad-band signals complicates the detection problem
significantly. Frequency-hopped signals interleaved with quiescent
bands are proposed as the basis of a robust detection system. These
signals also make robust detection possible in a multi-access com-
munications system. Two new detection algorithms that exploit
the particular structure of these frequency-hopped signals are
developed and their performance is analyzed. This analysis uses a
modification of the doubly noncentral -distribution that has not
been used previously for such analysis. This distribution makes
possible the direct calculation of probabilities of detection and
false-alarm under interference and signal scenarios that cannot
be analyzed using the better known noncentral -distribution.
With this analysis, the two developed detectors are shown to offer
superior performance to that of either the CFAR detector or the
binary data sequence detector. Experimental data confirms the
theoretically derived results.
Index TermsF-distribution, robust detection, underwater
acoustic communication.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE underwater acoustic environment poses significant
challenges for reliable signal detection. Significant
event-like interference in the form of both continuous
narrow-band and impulsive broad-band signals compromises
the performance of matched filter detectors. Two new detection
algorithms are presented herein that offer robust performance
in the presence of these types of interfering signals while
maintaining excellent performance in the presence of stationary
broad-band background noise.
The organization of this paper is as follows. Section II
contains a brief description of interference sources and channel
characteristics in the underwater acoustic environment. The
details of a frequency-hopped signaling format that is well
matched to the proposed detectors is presented in Section III.
The two proposed detection algorithms as well as two pre-
viously published approaches that are analyzed here for
Manuscript received May 15, 2000; revised July 19, 2001. This work was
supported by the Office of Naval Research. This paper is WHOI Contribution
Number 10193.
The authors are with the Department of Applied Ocean Physics and Engi-
neering, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543 USA
(e-mail: jpreisig@whoi.edu).
Publisher Item Identifier S 0364-9059(01)09912-5.
03649059/01$10.00 2001 IEEE
IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 26, NO.
comparison purposes are detailed in Section IV. Section V
presents the statistical framework necessary to analyze the
performance of the detection algorithms as well as the results
of the performance analysis. The application of the developed
probability distributions to nonideal signal and channel sce-
narios is described in Section VI. The application to analyzing
multi-access performance is described in Section VII. Finally,
the mathematical details of the derivation of the probability
distributions used in calculating the results in Sections V and
VII are presented in Appendices A and B.
II. NOISE AND INTERFERENCE IN THE UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC
ENVIRONMENT
An acoustic communications system, particularly one func-
tioning in an environment with an autonomous underwater ve-
hicle (AUV), must contend with a number of man-made inter-
ference sources in addition to the more familiar ambient noise
sources such as wave-generated and biological noise. Signifi-
cant interference sources include acoustic navigation systems,
other acoustic communication sources, and thruster and actu-
ator noise. Thruster and actuator noise often contains tonal com-
ponents and therefore introduces narrow-band interference to a
communications receiver on-board the vehicle. Navigation sig-
nals are usually impulsive in nature and, due to the high signal
levels involved, are often the most troubling of these interfering
signals. This is especially true when the navigation signal pro-
jector and the communications receiver are co-located on a ve-
hicle or mooring.
Common underwater navigation systems used with vehicles
involve short duration (310 ms), high source level (188196 dB
re 1 Pa @ 1 m) signals usually transmitted in the 813-kHz
or 1827-kHz frequency bands. Frequencies within the band
of 454 kHz, which encompasses the operating bands of most
underwater acoustic communication systems, are within an oc-
tave of these two common navigation frequency bands. There-
fore, these navigation signals are not strongly rejected by the
analog input filters typically found in acoustic communication
receivers. In comparison, the received level of a communica-
tions signal at 5-km range may be on the order of 110 dB. As
a consequence, overload of the receiver analog-to-digital con-
verter is inevitable during navigation transmissions where the
communication and navigation functions are co-located. In the
case where they are not co-located, the receive level of the nav-
igation signals may still be equal to or greater than that of the
communication signals. A solution to this problem is to develop
detection, synchronization, and data modulation methodologies
that are robust to these types of interfering signals. This work
PREISIG AND JOHNSON: SIGNAL DETECTION FOR COMMUNICATIONS IN THE UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT
focuses on the development and analysis of a robust detection
methodology.
III. FREQUENCY-HOPPED SIGNALING FOR DETECTION
The limit on realizable detection performance is fundamen-
tally set by the choice of the signal transmitted for detection pur-
poses. The performance of a linear matched-filter detector in the
presence of white noise is completely determined by the energy
in the transmitted signal and the spectral density of the noise
[1], [2]. However, other factors must be considered in more com-
plex interference environments or when there are additional per-
formance requirements. For example, signals employing either
linear frequency modulation (chirp) or phase-shift-keyed (psk)
signals modulated by data sequences with good auto-correla-
tion properties (e.g., the Barker code, the Turin code, maximum
length sequences) are often used for both detection and synchro-
nization. These signals offer good detection and synchroniza-
tion performance with matched-filter detectors. However, while
the matched-filter detector is optimal for detecting a known
signal in the presence of white Gaussian noise of known spec-
tral density, its performance can suffer when the interference vi-
olates this assumption [3]. The interfering signals described in
Section II are examples of signals that can compromise the per-
formance of a matched-filter detector operating on simple chirp
or psk signals. Frequency-hopped signals are a class of signals
that make robust detection possible in complex propagation and
interference environments. In addition, these signals effectively
accommodate multiple users in a multi-access communications
system as shown in Section VII.
Frequency-hopped signalling makes use of the available fre-
quency bandwidth by dividing it into subbands with the
center frequency of the th band denoted by . The frequency-
hopped detection signal is made up of pulses where
. The index of the center frequency of the transmitted pulse
during the th symbol period is denoted by . Each pulse has
length . Thus, the frequency-hopped signal can be expressed
as
for (1)
Here, is the transmit pulse shape resulting from user-se-
lected time-domain windowing as well as the effect of transmit
electronics. The function returns the real part of its argu-
ment. The subbands in which the detection signal is transmitted
are referred to as the signal subbands. and are usually se-
lected so where is the delay spread of the
channel impulse response. This selection ensures that succes-
sive pulses transmitted in the same subband will not interfere
with one another.
Note that , which implies that some of the subbands
do not contain a portion of the transmitted frequency-hopped
signal. These signal-free subbands allow detection algorithms
to estimate background noise levels and/or provide standards
for comparison with the detected energy in the signal subbands.
The signal-free subbands will be referred to as the quiescent
subbands. Denote the set of indices of the center frequencies
(i.e., the subband numbers) of the subset of quiescent subbands
573
Fig. 1. Receiver preprocessing.
used for comparison with the measurements of the energy in the
th signal subband as and let the cardinality of this set equal
. That is,
Note that it is possible that a single quiescent subband may be
used for estimating the background noise level for use in com-
parison with more than one signal subband. The tradeoffs asso-
ciated with the selection of as well as the frequency of re-use
of the quiescent subbands are discussed in Section V-B.
The choice of the signal subbands as well as the selection of
the order of transmission in these subbands provides a method
of differentiating the detection signals for different users in a
multi-access communications system. A method of analysis of
the performance of the detection algorithms in the multi-access
scenario is described in Section VII.
IV. SIGNAL DETECTION ALGORITHMS
The signal detection algorithms described herein share a
common structure with most detection algorithms. That is,
each uses the received signal to create a detection metric that is
compared with a threshold to select between the two possible
hypotheses, indicating no signal present and indicating
a signal present [1], [2]. The detection algorithms differ in the
manner in which the metric is calculated.
It is assumed that signals are initially filtered and sampled
at a rate . The sampled signal is then beat to baseband for
each of the subband carrier frequencies and passed through an
appropriate lowpass filter, . The magnitude squared of
the complex baseband signals , denoted by for
, are the raw signals to be processed by the detection
algorithms. The signal preprocessing is shown in Fig. 1 where
. Without any loss of generality, it is assumed here
that the signals are downsampled following the filtering opera-
tion shown in Fig. 1 to a baseband rate, for some
integer .
In a practical implementation, the multiband demodulation
and decimation processing could be implemented efficiently
using a multirate technique. However, the detailed design of
the preprocessing algorithm is beyond the scope this paper. The
performance analysis in Section V assumes that the filter
is constructed so that a signal transmitted in the th subband
574
does not affect the filtered outputs
for any . The effect of subband crosstalk resulting
from either nonideal filter design or from environmental effects
is discussed in Section VI-A.
A. The Classical Approach
The classical approach to detection in the presence of un-
known noise levels is commonly referred to as the Constant
False Alarm Rate (CFAR) detector [1]. This detector is also re-
ferred to as the mean-level detector [4]. In the context of de-
tecting the frequency hopped signal described in Section III in
the presence of white Gaussian noise, the detection metric is
given by
(2)
While this detector is a CFAR detector only when the inter-
ference is additive white Gaussian noise, it will be referred to
as the CFAR detector in the discussion of detector performance
for all interference scenarios considered herein. The shifting in
time of the outputs for each of the frequency bands in com-
puting the metric is necessary to time-align the signals trans-
mitted in each subband as described in (1). This shifting in time
is common to all of the detectors described herein.
Under the assumptions that the baseband background noise
is white complex Gaussian noise and that and
are independent random variables for or
, the pdf of is the -distribution. Hence, the notation
. The division by 2 in both the numerator and denominator
in (2) results from the fact that each variable is the sum of
the magnitude squared of the real and imaginary parts of the
complex baseband signal in each subband. If the numerator is
considered to be an estimate of the signal plus noise energy in
the signal subbands and the denominator is considered to be an
estimate of the noise energy common to all subbands, then
is an estimate of the ratio of the signal plus noise energy to noise
energy.
In the presence of nonstationary impulsive or narrow-band
interference, the performance of the CFAR detector can de-
grade significantly. The following simplified examples, which
are the limiting cases of the interference scenarios described
in Section II, illustrate this performance degradation. Consider
the case of an impulsive interfering signal contaminating all
subbands with an equal amount of energy at just one point in
time (i.e., is contaminated for all and one ). In the
limit as the interfering energy gets large, will approach
one for . This limit will be
approached whether or not a signal is present, thus reducing the
probability of detection for any given detector threshold greater
than one.
Next consider the case of a single narrow-band interferer con-
taminating just one subband. If this subband is a signal subband
(i.e., for some ), then gets large as the
energy in the interfering signal gets large. This happens whether
IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 26, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2001
or not a signal is present, thus increasing the probability of false
alarm for any given detector threshold. Finally, if the contami-
nated subband is one of the quiescent subbands, then ap-
proaches zero as the interfering signal gets large. This happens
whether or not a signal is present, thus reducing the probability
of detection for any given detector threshold.
The censored mean-level detector was developed to eliminate
the performance degradation associated with interfering signals
in the context of target detection with radar [4], [5]. In the con-
text of the frequency-hopped signaling considered herein, the
censored mean-level detector performs a rank ordering of the
energy measurements in the quiescent subbands and eliminates
the largest measurements from the sum in the denominator
of (2) for a selected value of . While this technique would
be effective in eliminating the detector performance degrada-
tion in the third example given previously in this section (single
narrow-band interferer in a quiescent subband), it would do
nothing to restore acceptable performance in the first two ex-
amples. In contrast, the detectors detailed in the Section V will
be shown to maintain effective performance in all of the inter-
ference scenarios described previously in this section.
B. Robust Detectors for the Underwater Environment
The approach for developing a robust detector is to calculate
a ratio of signal band to quiescent band energy for each symbol
(tone) period, perform a nonlinear transformation on this ratio
to confine it to the range of zero to one, and then average the re-
sult over all symbol periods. Intuitively, by computing the ratio
individually for each symbol period, the effect of an impulsive
or narrow-band interferer is restricted to a small subset of the
ratio calculations. The nonlinear transformation prevents a ratio
whose computation uses the energy estimate from one or more
contaminated subbands from dominating the calculation of the
average ratio over all of the symbol periods.
The starting point for computing the detection metrics is to es-
timate the energy in the signal and quiescent bands. Let
and . The quantity
is an estimate of the signal energy plus noise power in a signal
subband while is an estimate of the noise power in each
quiescent subband. The energy ratio for each symbol period is
given by
(3)
The proposed detection metrics can each be expressed as
(4)
where
(5)
and the function is the specific memoryless nonlinearity as-
sociated with each detector.
PREISIG AND JOHNSON: SIGNAL DETECTION FOR COMMUNICATIONS IN THE UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT 575

(a) (b)
Fig. 2. Theoretical ROC curves with no impulsive or narrow-band interference for (a) C = 3, and (b) C = 1.

Three detectors are detailed here. The first detector is referred
to as the type detector with the detection metric denoted by
. The memoryless nonlinearity for this detector is
(6)
Thus, this detection metric is the ratio of the energy in the signal
subband to a weighted sum of the energy in the signal subband
and the average energy in the quiescent subbands. The interpre-
tation of this detector is of particular interest for and
. In the former case, (9) reduces to

is always nonnegative so this function is bounded between

zero and one. Substituting (3) into (6) yields
This function is referred to as in [6] where its pdf is derived
for the special case of no interfering signal in any of the quies-
cent subbands. For the case of , (9) reduces to
(7)

The intuition behind this nonlinearity is that, under the assump-

tion of equal noise power in each subband, the numerator is an
estimate of the signal energy in the signal subband. Thus, the re- This function is referred to as in [7] but its probability dis-
sult is an estimate of the signal to signal-plus-noise ratio (SNR). tribution is not derived therein.
Hardlimiting the ratio at zero prevents measurements that vio- The final detector examined here is the binary data detector.
late the assumption of equal noise power in each subband (e.g., It is presented here only for comparison purposes as the limiting
a large narrow-band interferer in one or more of the quiescent case of the memoryless nonlinearity taking on only the values
subbands) from overly influencing the result. Note that the pres- of 0 and 1. The detection metric in this case is denoted by
ence of a large narrow-band interferer in the signal band would and the memoryless nonlinearity is
drive the result to one while a large impulsive interferer that af-
fects all bands equally would drive the result to zero.
The second detector is referred to as the type detector with
the detection metric denoted by . The memoryless nonlin- (10)
earity for this detector is
Substituting (3) into (10) yields
(8)

where is a design parameter greater than zero. Note that, for

, this function is bounded between zero and one. Substi- (11)
tuting (3) into (8) yields
For the case of , (11) is a binary fsk decision device.
In Section V, the performance of each detector detailed in this
(9)
section is analyzed under different interference scenarios.
576 IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 26, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2001

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 3. Theoretical detector performance with impulsive interference for (a) P with C = 3, (b) P with C = 3, (c) P with C = 1, and (d) P with C = 1.
Note that the curves for the two type  detectors in (a) and (b) are virtually identical and indistinguishable.

V. DETECTION PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS noise. The deterministic signals can be any one of three types.
These are the transmitted frequency-hopped detection signal,
Each of the detection algorithms is evaluated here using two
an impulsive interference signal, and a narrow-band interfer-
criteria. The first is the receiver operating characteristic (ROC)
ence signal. Thus, the complex baseband signals,
curve under nominal operating conditions. The second is the
, are complex Gaussian random variables with inde-
change in operating characteristics in the presence of impulsive
pendent real and imaginary parts. Let and denote the
and narrow-band interference. This section details the evalua-
mean and variance, respectively, of . Note that the means
tion of each algorithm and is divided into three parts. In the
will vary across the bands and with time according to the pres-
first, the statistical model upon which the theoretical perfor-
ence or absence of the deterministic signals. The variance is
mance analysis is based is detailed. In the second, the results
independent of band and time under the assumption of white
of the theoretical performance analysis using the above criteria
background noise. Then is a chi-squared or noncentral
are presented and discussed. These theoretical results are calcu-
chi-squared random variable with 2 degrees of freedom
lated using the probability distributions derived in Appendices
and a noncentrality parameter of . See Ap-
A and B. Finally, experimental data is presented supporting the
pendix A for a discussion of the parameters associated with the
theoretical results.
statistical characterization of chi-squared random variables.
It is assumed here that the effective bandwidth of the subband
A. The Statistical Model filter, , as shown in Fig. 1, is no greater than the spacing
The received signal is assumed to be the sum of de- between any two carrier frequencies, and . Under this as-
terministic signals plus zero-mean white Gaussian background sumption, and are independent random variables
PREISIG AND JOHNSON: SIGNAL DETECTION FOR COMMUNICATIONS IN THE UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT 577

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 4. Theoretical detector performance with narrow-band interference in a quiescent subband for (a) P with C = 3, (b) P with C = 3, (c) P with C = 1,
and (d) P with C = 1.

for and any and . A second assumption is that the a detection signal is present its contribution is the same in all
duration of the impulse response of is no greater than signal subbands (i.e., the channel has a flat frequency response).
samples (i.e., the number of samples per symbol period). Under A method for handling the effects of independent fading in the
this assumption, and are independent random vari- signal subbands is described in Section VI-B.
ables for .
Two further assumptions are made regarding the various de- B. Theoretical Performance Comparisons
terministic signals that contribute to the complex baseband sig- Theoretical performance measures for the detectors described
nals, . Let , , and de- in Section IV are presented for two signaling examples. In both
note the contribution to of the frequency-hopped detection cases, a system with 34 subbands of which one half are signal
signal, impulsive interfering signal, and narrow-band interfering subbands is considered. The signal parameters as defined in
signal, respectively. Then, it is assumed that Sections III and V-A are , ,
(i.e., the in-band SNR equals 3 dB with respect to stationary
(12) broad-band background noise), , and
. When the impulsive interfering signal is
That is, the contributions of these three signals to are present, it is assumed to be present for only one symbol period.
orthogonal. This assumption is common to the analysis of all However, the impulsive interfering signal contaminates all sub-
of the detectors so it does not affect the evaluation of their bands during this one symbol period. When the narrow-band
relative performance. Finally, it is assumed that interfering signal is present, it is assumed to contaminate only
. The implication of this is that when one frequency subband. However, the narrow-band interfering
578
(a)
(c)
Fig. 5. Theoretical detector performance with narrow-band interference in a signal subband for (a) P with C=
and (d) P with C = 1. Note that the curves for the type I and type  ( = 1) detectors in (b) and (d) are virtually identical and indistinguishable.
signal contaminates this frequency subband for all symbol
periods. The two examples are distinguished by the number of
quiescent subbands used in computing the detection metrics:
for the first example and for the second example.
The results are shown in Figs. 25. Note that the probability of
false alarm, , is plotted on a log scale in all of these figures
as well as in Fig. 7.
Fig. 2 shows the ROC curves for the two examples when no
interfering signals are present. That is, the received signal con-
sists of the transmitted signal plus zero-mean white Gaussian
background noise. The performance is comparable for all de-
tectors except for the binary data detector, whose performance
is worse than that of the other detectors. The performance of all
detectors is better when than it is for , illustrating
the benefit of the statistical averaging in estimating the back-
ground noise level.
The remaining figures show the performance results under
different interference scenarios. The scenarios shown are an im-
pulsive interfering signal (Fig. 3), a narrow-band interfering
IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 26, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2001
(b)
(d)
3, (b) P with C = 3, (c) P with C = 1,
signal in a quiescent subband (Fig. 4), and a narrow-band in-
terfering signal in a signal subband (Fig. 5). Parts (a) and (c) of
each of these figures show the actual probability of detection,
, as a function of the design and parts (b) and (d) show the
actual as a function of the design . The design is the
probability of false alarm that the detector would have achieved
if no interfering signal were present. The use of this quantity as
the independent axis in these figures gives a common indepen-
dent axis with Fig. 2, allowing direct independent evaluation of
the effect of the interfering signals on and .
These results all show a significant decline in the performance
of the CFAR detector when compared to both the type and
type detectors where such a decline is defined as a signifi-
cant rise in the actual or a significant drop in the actual
for a given design . Note that, in the case of the narrow-band
interferer in a signal subband, increases for all detectors at
any given threshold level and that the increase is most dramatic
for the CFAR detector. However, the actual also increases
for all detectors and the increase is again most dramatic for the
PREISIG AND JOHNSON: SIGNAL DETECTION FOR COMMUNICATIONS IN THE UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT
Fig. 6. Memoryless nonlinearity G for different detectors.
CFAR detector. Therefore, while all detectors will maintain an
adequate for a given design , the actual is unaccept-
ably high for the CFAR detector at the same design .
The performance decline of the binary data detector in the
presence of interfering signals largely mirrors that of the type
and type detectors. Thus, given the inferior performance of
the binary data detector when no interfering signal is present,
the performance of the binary data detector when interfering
signals are present remains inferior to that of the type and type
detectors.
In general, the performance of the type detector is superior
to that of the type detector, and, as noted previously, the per-
formance of the type and detectors is superior to that of the
binary data detector. Intuitively, this ordering of detector perfor-
mance can be explained by the information lost in the evaluation
of by the type and binary data detectors. This information
loss is illustrated in Fig. 6 which shows the function for
each of the detectors. Note that for the functions and
both equal zero and are noninvertible. This represents a loss
of information by the processor. For , equals one and is
therefore noninvertible over this range again representing a loss
of information. The binary data detector represents the limiting
case of this information loss during the nonlinear transforma-
tion in that only one bit of information ( or ) is
available after the transformation. This information loss results
in the relatively poor performance of the binary data detector
when compared to the other detectors. In contrast, the function
is invertible over the entire range of thus imposing no loss
information loss. It should be noted though that the practical
constraint of finite precision arithmetic results in an information
loss for all the detectors. However, the evaluation of the effect
of such finite precision on the information loss of each function
is beyond scope of this paper.
It is instructive to observe that the detectors for which
maintain superior performance compared to those for which
when there is a narrow-band interferer in a quiescent
subband. Note that, when , each quiescent subband is
579
Fig. 7. ROC curve for experimental data.
used in computing for three different symbol periods, , in
(3). Thus, three energy ratios are contaminated by the interfering
signal. However, at the SNR used here, the benefit of improved
statistical averaging for outweighs the disadvantage of
the contaminated quiescent subband being used in calculating
three of the energy ratios used in (4) and (5).
C. Experimental Data
Experimental data was collected in Woods Hole harbor to
test the performance of each detector on a common set of re-
ceived signals. The frequency-hopped signals were transmitted
in the 1116-kHz frequency band with , ,
and msec. Broad-band noise was transmitted simulta-
neously with the frequency-hopped signals at a level such that
(i.e., the in-band SNR equaled 3 dB).
The ambient noise in the harbor is quite variable and often
at a high level. Significant sources of noise in the harbor in-
clude outboard motors, propulsion and machinery noise on large
ships, and acoustic depth sounders. These sources combined to
drop the SNR below 3 dB at times and added some impulsive
interference to the received signal. For approximately one half
of the duration of the test transmissions, other acoustic equip-
ment including broad-band tomography sources and subbottom
profilers were also being used near the test site. These sources
added additional high-level interference including impulsive,
continuous broad-band, and chirp signals. Thus, the data col-
lected yields a good measure of detector performance under a
variety of realistic interference conditions.
The ROC curves derived from the received data are shown in
Fig. 7. For these results, . is calculated using 3489
data points and is calculated using 16 784 data points. The
results confirm the superior performance of the type and type
detectors when compared to both the CFAR and binary data
detectors. The experimental results for the type , type , and bi-
nary data detectors closely match the theoretically predicted re-
sults for these detectors for the case of no interference, as shown
in Fig. 2(a). This indicates that these detectors are robust with
respect to the interference sources encountered during the tests.
580
The performance of the CFAR detector falls short of that pre-
dicted in Fig. 2(a) confirming its performance degradation in the
presence of the interference sources encountered during the test
transmissions.
VI. DEPARTURES FROM IDEAL SYSTEM ASSUMPTIONS
The theoretical performance analysis in Section V assumes
ideal system characteristics. The first of these assumptions is
that the transmission of a signal in one subband does not af-
fect the filter output in any other subband. This corresponds
to subband orthogonality with no Doppler shift or spread in
the received signal. The second of these assumptions is that
the acoustic channel is not delay spread. That is, the impulse
response of the channel is an impulse. Fortunately, departures
from these assumptions can be analyzed theoretically using the
doubly noncentral -distribution. The analysis exploits the fact
that the pdf is conditioned upon and (17) and is detailed
in Section VI-A and VI-B.
A. Subband Crosstalk
Vehicle motion resulting in Doppler shifts of transmit signal
bands as well as design choices in transmit pulse shaping , frequency hopped detection signal and may detect any one of
subband filtering , and subband spacing can all cause sig-
nals transmitted in one subband to affect the filter outputs in
other signal or quiescent subbands. In addition, these events can
result in a reduction in the received signal energy in the intended
signal subband. The effect of either reduced subband signal en-
ergy or subband crosstalk on detection performance can be an-
alyzed in a deterministic manner using the doubly noncentral
-distribution by appropriate adjustment of the noncentrality
parameter for the affected subbands. Consider the case of sub-
band filtering that results in energy transmitted in one signal
subband showing up in the output of a filter for a quiescent
subband or another signal subband. Such a case may occur if
FFT-based processing restricts the receiver subband center fre-
quencies and bandwidths to values that do not exactly match
those of the transmitted signals. In this case, the noncentrality
parameter for the transmit subband is decreased by the amount
of energy that has leaked out of the band. In addition, the non-
centrality parameter for the signal or quiescent subbands into
which the energy has leaked is increased be the amount of this
energy. This adjustment is made for only the affected subbands.
These modified noncentrality parameters are then used in the
same manner as described in more detail in Section VII to cal-
culate the impact on and .
B. The Delay Spread Channel
The calculations in Section V assume that the magnitude
squared of the received frequency-hopped detection signal is the
same in each signal subband. However, subbands spaced fur-
ther apart in frequency than approximately Hz
can exhibit independent fading behavior in realistic channels.
Under the common assumption that the magnitude of the
impulse response of the channel is either a Rayleigh or Ricean
random variable, then is a chi-squared or noncentral
chi-squared random variable.
IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 26, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2001
Let denote the pdf of the noncentrality parameter
for each of the signal subbands. This pdf can be derived from
the Rayleigh or other statistical channel assumption. Then,
assuming independent fading in each signal subband, the
effects of random channel fading on each of the detectors
analyzed here with the exception of the CFAR detector can be
accommodated by replacing with
(13)
in the calculation of the pdf of each detector as detailed in
Appendix B. Here, denotes the pdf of under the fading
channel assumption. In calculating the pdf of the CFAR
detector, the noncentrality parameter is the sum of the indepen-
dent noncentrality parameters for each signal subband. Thus,
the pdf of the noncentrality parameter used in (13) will be the
convolution of the pdfs of the noncentrality parameter for each
of the subbands.
Another issue that arises in the delay spread channel is the im-
pact of signal arrivals spread by a delay of greater than . For
the single-user case, these multiple arrivals increase since
the detector receives multiple noninterfering repetitions of the
them. This may impact proper synchronization depending on
the synchronization approach used by the receiver. However, the
analysis of the synchronization issues is not considered here. In
the multi-user case, these multiple arrivals can have the adverse
impact of increasing or decreasing as described in Sec-
tion VII.
VII. MULTI-ACCESS DETECTION PERFORMANCE
Frequency-hopped signaling can be used for detection pur-
poses in a multi-access communications system as well. Dif-
ferent assigned signal subbands and order of transmission in the
subbands can be used to differentiate the signals from different
users. The number of collisions between the signals from dif-
ferent users is the factor that determines the effect of the signal
from one user on the performance of an algorithm in detecting
the signal from another user. Here, a collision is an incident
of the signal from an interfering user occupying either a signal
or quiescent subband of a desired user during a symbol period
during which a detection algorithm would be using the energy
in that subband to calculate a detection metric. In this paper the
impact of such collisions on detector performance quantified by
a change in or is analyzed. The reader interested in de-
termining how to minimize collisions by the choice of signal
and quiescent subbands or their order of transmission is referred
to [8].
The effect of interfering signals can be modeled deterministi-
cally by adjusting values of the noncentrality parameters associ-
ated with one users received signals to account for the presence
of interfering frequency-hopped signals in that users signal or
quiescent subbands during some symbol periods. This is similar
to the approach used in Section V to model narrow-band inter-
ference.
As an example, consider the case where there are an equal
number of signal and quiescent subbands and . Then
PREISIG AND JOHNSON: SIGNAL DETECTION FOR COMMUNICATIONS IN THE UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT 581

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

(e) (f)
Fig. 8. Theoretical detector performance with multiaccess interference for: (a) P for case 1; (b) P for case 1; (c) P for case 2; (d) P for case 2; (e) P for
case 3; and (f) P for case 3. Note that the curves for the type I and type  detectors in (d) are indistinguishable.
582
each signal subband is paired with a single quiescent subband.
When is a prime number and there is a delay spread of
symbol periods, it is possible to create sets of order-
ings of the signal and quiescent subbands pairs so that there are
only collisions between the signals assigned to any two
users. Let and as was the case for the anal-
ysis in Section V-B. Assume that there are six collisions be-
tween the signal from an interfering user with the signal from
a desired user for which the detection performance is analyzed.
This is a worst-case number of collisions for a channel in which
. Assume also that the received signal power is the
same for each user in each signal subband and that the energy
contributions of the signals from each user add orthogonally.
Three cases are considered here. In Case 1, the signal subband
of each user is a quiescent subband for the other user for half
of the collisions while the signal subband for each user is also a
signal subband for the other user for the remaining collisions. In
Case 2, the signal subband for each user is also a signal subband
for the other user for all collisions. In Case 3, the signal subband
for each user is a quiescent subband for the other user for all
collisions.
Qualitatively, the collisions resulting in the signal from the
interfering user falling in the signal subband of the desired user
will increase both and in a manner similar to the effect of
the narrow-band interference in a signal subband. The collisions
resulting in the signal from the interfering user falling in the qui-
escent subband of the desired user will decrease both and
in a manner similar to the effect of the narrow-band inter-
ference in a quiescent subband. A quantitative analysis requires
modification of the probability distribution functions used in the
calculation of and . APPENDIX A
Under the assumptions detailed earlier in this section, the
noncentrality parameters of the pdfs of for six affected
symbol periods are modified. These pdfs are then used along
with the pdfs of the 11 unaffected symbol periods to cal-
culate the detector performance metric as described in the
introduction to Appendix B. For the symbol periods during
which the interfering signal falls in a signal subband, a term
representing the energy contribution of the interfering signal to
the appropriate signal subband is added to the sum in (12). For
the symbol periods during which the interfering signal falls in
a quiescent subband, a similar adjustment to the sum in (12)
is made for the appropriate quiescent subband. The changes
to and calculated using this technique for the signal
parameters detailed earlier are shown in Fig. 8. As expected,
Case 2 [Fig. 8(c) and (d)] shows an increase in both the actual
and relative to their nominal values for a given decision
threshold [Fig. 2(b)]. Also as expected, Case 3 [Fig. 8(e) and
(f)] shows a decrease in both the actual and relative
to their nominal values for a given decision threshold. Case 1
[Fig. 8(a) and (b)], which has three collisions with the interferer
signal subband occupying a desired user quiescent subband and
three collisions with the interferer signal subband occupying a
desired user signal subband, shows a small decrease in both
and relative to their nominal values.
The effect of the interfering signals can also be modeled
stochastically in the style of (13) where is modified
to account for both channel fading and the probability of an
IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 26, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2001
interfering signal being present in the users signal subband.
The integration in (13) must also be carried out over to
account for interfering signals in the desired users quiescent
subbands.
VIII. CONCLUSION
The wide variety of interfering signals in the underwater
acoustic environment results in poor detection performance
of both traditional matched filter and CFAR algorithms. A
frequency-hopped signaling format is outlined here that uses
both signal and quiescent subbands. This signaling format is
exploited by two detection algorithms proposed here. The two
detection algorithms are the type and type detectors and
provide superior performance when significant interferers are
both present and not present. The algorithms use independent
calculation of energy ratios and nonlinear transformations of
the ratios followed by incoherent averaging to achieve robust
performance with respect to interfering signals.
The performance of these two detectors is compared to that of
the CFAR and binary data detectors. A new probability distri-
bution, the doubly noncentral -distribution, is presented and
used to calculate the probability distributions of the detectors
and to theoretically analyze their performance under a number
of interference scenarios. This analysis predicts the superior
performance of the type and type detectors. Experimental
data confirms this superior performance. The doubly noncen-
tral -distribution presented here provides a powerful tool to
analyze the effect of many different environments and design
tradeoffs on the performance of these detection algorithms.
THE DOUBLY NONCENTRAL -DISTRIBUTION
The probability distribution required to calculate the ROC
curve for each of the detectors analyzed herein under the in-
terference scenarios of interest is the doubly noncentral -dis-
tribution. The statistical assumptions that make this distribution
necessary are detailed in Section V. To relate the doubly noncen-
tral -distribution to the statistical characteristics of the random
variables of interest, let be a sequence of indepen-
dent Gaussian variables with
Let
(14)
and
Then, for the case that , is a chi-squared random vari-
able with degrees of freedom. If , then is a noncen-
tral chi-squared random variable with degrees of freedom and
a noncentrality parameter .
If the nonzero means of the Gaussian random variables in the
sum in (14) represent the signal contribution to the random vari-
PREISIG AND JOHNSON: SIGNAL DETECTION FOR COMMUNICATIONS IN THE UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT 583

able , then the noncentrality parameter has the interpretation Two identities [10] are useful in simplifying the computation
of a scaled signal to noise ratio. Note also that the sum of in- of The first is
dependent chi-squared random variables is also a chi-squared
random variable. Therefore, under the statistical assumptions (18)
outlined in Section V, the quantities and defined in
Section IV are themselves chi-squared random variables. In ad- where is the Beta function and is the Gamma
dition, the numerator and denominator used in the calculation function. The second useful identity is
of the CFAR detection metric (2) are both chi-squared random
variables. (19)
Assume that and are independent chi-squared random
variables with degrees of freedom and and noncentrality for nonnegative integer values of .
parameters and , respectively. Then the ratio Under the assumptions in Section V, is a complex
Gaussian random variable with independent real and imag-
inary parts. Therefore, is a chi-squared or noncentral
(15) chi-squared random variable with 2 degrees of freedom.
Furthermore, and are independent for . As
a result, the number of degrees of freedom of the chi-squared
is said to follow an -distribution for the case that and (or noncentral chi-squared) random variables and
. If and , in (15) is usually denoted by is always an even integer. Thus the coefficients of the Beta
and is said to follow a noncentral -distribution [9]. For the function in are always integers and the identity in (19) is
case of most general interest here, that is and , applicable.
in (15) will be denoted by . A term for the distribution of has At , (17) reduces to
not be found in the literature so herein it will be referred to as
the doubly noncentral -distribution. Note that if the variance
is the same for the Gaussian random variables included in the
sums comprising both and , then the division by can be
eliminated from the definition in (14) without affecting the ratio
in (15). Hence, the computation of the random variables
described in Section IV does not include a division by the noise The case of is not of concern here since, for the reasons
variance. stated in the preceding paragraph, is always an even integer.
The quantity is related to the quantity as defined in [6] by
the simple scaling . The pdf of is derived in [6] APPENDIX B
and will not be repeated herein. It is straight forward to show PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS OF THE DETECTION METRICS
that for any two random variables, and , related by
for a positive constant , the pdfs of and are related by The probability distributions of the detection metrics detailed
in Section IV can all be represented as functions of the doubly
noncentral -distribution, Clearly, the CFAR detection
metric defined in (2) has as its pdf. The derivation of the
(16)
distributions for the remaining detection metrics is detailed
below.
Using (16) the pdf of in [6] can be manipulated to yield the Using (4) and (5) as the starting points, the probability distri-
pdf of bution of will be derived for each of the detectors. These distri-
butions can then be used to calculate the probability distribution
of for each detector. Under the assumptions in Section V, the
terms and are inde-
pendent random variables for . Therefore, the probability
distribution of the detection metric is the convolution of the
probability distribution of each term in the sum in (4). Appro-
priate values of the noncentrality parameters must be made for
each pdf used in the convolution. The noncentrality parameters
for each term in (4) will depend on the whether or not a signal,
impulsive interferer, or narrow-band interferer is present in the
signal band and symbol period in question.
In the derivations that follow, the dependence of the variable
(17) on and is suppressed for notational
convenience. In addition, the following notation will be used.
where is the Beta function. If and , then will denote the pmf of (i.e., the probability that the
(17) reduces to the -distribution. If and , then ) and denote the cdf of (i.e., the probability
(17) reduces to the noncentral -distribution. that ).
584 IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 26, NO. 4, OCTOBER 2001

A. Detector B. Detector
Combining (5) and (6) yields Combining (5) and (8) yields

Differentiating with respect to yields

(20)

From (20), it is clear that

(21)

(24)
Note that for , and for , (20)
can be rearranged to yield
At , (24) reduces to

Differentiating with respect to yields

The case of is not of concern here since for the reasons

stated in Appendix A, is always an even integer.

(22) C. Detector
From (5) and (10), it is clear that
where is the delta function and the convention

(25)

REFERENCES
is assumed. Evaluating (22) and combining with (21) yields the
[1] C. W. Helstrom, Elements of Signal Detection and Estima-
desired result of tion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995.
[2] H. L. Van Trees, Detection, Estimation, and Modulation Theory, Part
I. New York, NY: Wiley, 1968.
[3] S. A. Kassam and H. V. Poor, Robust techniques for signal processing:
A survey, Proc. IEEE, vol. 73, pp. 433477, Mar. 1985.
(23) [4] J. T. Rickard and G. M. Dillard, Adaptive detection algorithms for
multiple-target situations, IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron. Syst., vol.
AES-13, pp. 338343, July 1977.
where the dependence of on , , , and has been [5] J. A. Ritcey, Performance analysis of the censored mean-level de-
suppressed for notational convenience. tector, IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron. Syst., vol. AES-22, pp. 443454,
July 1986.
At , (23) reduces to [6] P. C. Tang, The power function of the analysis of variance tests with
tables and illustrations of their use, Statistic. Res. Memoirs, vol. 2, pp.
126149, 1938.
[7] P. B. Patnaik, The noncentral  - and F -distributions and their appli-
cations, Biometrika, vol. 36, pp. 202232, 1949.
[8] P. Fan and M. Darnell, Sequence Design for Communications Applica-
tions. Hertfordshire, U.K.: Research Studies Press, 1996.
[9] G. H. Robertson, Computation of the noncentral F distribution
(CFAR) detection, IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron. Syst., vol. AES-12,
pp. 568571, Sept. 1976.
[10] M. Abramowitz and I. Stegun, Handbook of Mathematical Functions
With Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables . Aliso Viejo, CA:
The case of is not of concern here since for the reasons National Bureau of Standards Applied Mathematics Series, 1964, vol.
stated in Appendix A, is always an even integer. 55.
PREISIG AND JOHNSON: SIGNAL DETECTION FOR COMMUNICATIONS IN THE UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT 585

James C. Preisig received the B.S. degree in Mark P. Johnson received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the
electrical engineering from the United States Coast University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, in 1992.
Guard Academy, New London, CT, in 1980, the S.M. Since 1993, he has been a Research Engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic
and E.E. degrees in electrical engineering from the Institution, Woods Hole, MA, developing underwater acoustic communication
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, systems and acoustic tags for marine mammals. His research interests are in
in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and ocean miniature signal processing instruments, bioacoustics, and algorithm design.
engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Joint Program in Oceanography and Oceanographic
Engineering, Woods Hole, MA, in 1992.
Since July 1997, he has been a Scientist in the De-
partment of Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering at the Woods Hole Oceano-
graphic Institution. His research interests are in the areas of adaptive signal pro-
cessing, underwater acoustic propagation modeling, and numerical optimiza-
tion.
Dr. Preisig is the recipient of the 1999 ONR Ocean Acoustics Young Faculty
Award. He is a member of the IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal
Processing Technical Committee and the ASA Underwater Acoustics and Signal
Processing Technical Committees.