TapTechNews August 24th, according to a report by the South China Morning Post on the 23rd, Chinese scientists have recently achieved a milestone breakthrough in an underwater communication test using the data encoding method developed by the domestic tech giant Huawei, successfully receiving a signal sent from 18.64 miles away, exceeding the longest underwater communication distance of 28 kilometers publicly disclosed by NATO.
Scientists involved in the project said that after the latest underwater data transmission technology was tested, remarkable results were achieved. TapTechNews learned that the water depth in the test area reached 9842.5 feet, and scientists deployed a small hydrophone 3280.8 feet below the sea surface and successfully received the signal sent by a ship 18.64 miles away, and the data transmission speed reached 4000 bits per second.
This achievement has refreshed the performance record of underwater acoustic communication equipment in public reports. Extremely low frequency (ELF) radio waves can penetrate water bodies, but with extremely low efficiency, only a few characters can be transmitted per minute. Sound waves are more efficient, but are prone to refraction by the sea surface and seabed, ocean currents and other environmental interferences, resulting in difficulties in transmitting a large amount of data over long distances.
The Chinese team used the Hybrid Polarization Weight (HPW) encoding method. The underwater acoustic communication equipment using this encoding method does not require data segmentation and can modulate information onto a single carrier for transmission and reception, greatly reducing the power consumption and complexity of the equipment.
In the test, the scientific team led by Professor Tong Feng from the College of Ocean and Earth Sciences of Xiamen University successfully achieved a super-long distance of 30 kilometers with zero-error code transmission in the frequency range of 4000 Hz to 8000 Hz.
HPW belongs to a type of polarization code. The polarization code was invented by Turkish scientist Erdal Arikan in 2008 and is the first algorithm that can increase the information transmission efficiency to the theoretical limit. Currently, polarization codes are widely used in 5G communications and consumer electronic products.