# On the Reusability of Post-Experimental Field Data for Underwater Acoustic Communications R&D

## TL;DR

This paper proposes modifications to underwater acoustic communication pipelines to enable effective reuse of field data for post-experimental research, reducing the need for re-collection and allowing long-term environment analysis.

## Contribution

It introduces a modified framework for underwater acoustic data collection and analysis that facilitates post-experimental environment replay and comparison without re-transmission.

## Key findings

- Modified communication pipeline enables post-experimental data reuse.
- Conditions for reliable environment replay are identified.
- Techniques for collecting environmental statistics for long-term analysis are discussed.

## Abstract

Field data is often expensive to collect, time-consuming to prepare to collect, and even more time-consuming to process after the experiment has concluded. However, it is often the practice that such data are used for little after the funded research activity that was concomitant with the experiment is completed. Immutability of the original experimental configuration either results in re-gathering of expensive field-data, or in absence of such data, model-dependent analysis that partially captures the real-world dynamics. For underwater acoustic research and development, the standard communication pipeline might be modified to enable greater re-usability of experimental field data. This paper first characterizes the necessary modifications to the standard communication pipeline to prepare signals for transmission and subsequent recording such that research trades for different modulation and coding schemes may be undertaken post-experiment, without the need for re-transmission of additional waveforms. Then, using the modified mathematical framework, sufficient conditions for reliable post-experimental replay of the environment are recognized. Finally, techniques are discussed to collect sufficient environmental statistics such that subsequent research can be accomplished long after the experiment has been completed, and that results from a given experiment may be reasonably compared with those of another. Examples are provided using both synthetic and experimental data collected from at-sea field tests.