Boosting Chirp Signal Based Aerial Acoustic Communication Under Dynamic Channel Conditions

Aerial acoustic communication attracts substantial attention for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness. Unfortunately, the preferred inaudible transmission has to strike a balance between the transmission rate and communication range, when the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) is under a certain threshold. Additionally, the performance of previous proposals can be deteriorated by dynamic channel conditions including near-far problem, device heterogeneity, and multipath fading. To this end, we propose a High-speed, long-range, and Robust Chirp Spread Spectrum (HRCSS) scheme for inaudible aerial acoustic communication under dynamic channels. HRCSS innovates in the definition of a loose orthogonality condition, and it leverages this orthogonality to overlap multiple chirp carriers in a single time duration to form a data symbol representing multiple bits, thereby substantially promoting the data rate. To further enhance system robustness in long communication ranges and dynamic channel conditions, we construct a lightweight rate adaptation algorithm and design a simple yet efficient normalization method. Experiment results reveal that HRCSS achieves a significant improvement in data rate over existing methods: it delivers 500 bps data rate with a BER of 0.24 percent at 10 m, and achieves 125 bps with zero BER at 20 m. Meanwhile, HRCSS can work adaptively under dynamic channel conditions while still retaining a BER below 3 percent.