Abstract:The Time Variable Acoustic Propagation Model (TV-APM) was developed to simulate underwater acoustic propagation in a time-variable environment; such variability induces a strong Doppler channel spread, which represents an important factor to test and to estimate the performance of equalization algorithms. In current simulations Doppler spread is usually included a posteriori over a stationary Acoustic Propagation Model (APM), and is design for specific environmental parameters as source-receiver range variability or surface motion. However, environmental variations affect Doppler spread in a complex manner, and an accurate TV-APM simulation along a time variable experiment, being performed at the same sampling rate as the transmitted signal, would require a huge number of runs for high frequencies. A strategy in the current implementation of the TV-APM was developed to reduce the number of runs, while preserving the variable-channel Doppler spread. Simulations were compared with real experiments communication signals and the results revealed that the TV-APM is a useful prediction tool of communication equalizers performance.