Ulaş Güntürkün of Marecomms

The underwater acoustic communication channels, shallow-water, horizontal channels in particular, differentiate themselves from the conventional terrestrial channels in their triply-dispersive nature. A sound/ultrasound signal transmitted under the water is dispersed in time, frequency and space, respectively, due to the effects of Doppler, multipath and non-homogenous water column.

Therefore, while a radio designer can cope with the effects of multipath and mobility using classical solutions, an underwater acoustic modem designer has to develop significantly more sophisticated algorithms. Specifically, for a radio channel, the mobility can be treated as a carrier frequency offset (CFO) and mitigated. The nature of the Doppler effect is, however, often much more complex in the underwater propagation media. Even if there is no platform mobility at all, there is still nonnegligible time-variations in the channel, due to the random motion of the water surface, water currents in various depths, and due to the fact that the speed of sound itself changes based on the water depth, salinity and other factors. Hence underwater propagation media can pose a significant challenge as they render conventional notions as coherence time and bandwidth undependable and sometimes non-existent.

In this talk, we will present some quantitative examples to illustrate the points above, as well as the results achieved by Marecomm’s breakthrough robust&broadband underwater technology - AQUABAND.

Biography:

Dr. Ulaş Güntürkün is the founder and CEO of Marecomms Inc., which is a Canadian company founded in 2017 to provide advanced wireless communication and remote sensing solutions for maritime environments based in Halifax, NS, Canada.

Dr. Güntürkün studied his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada between 2003 and 2008 with full bursary and scholarship. His dissertation addressed novel signal processing and probabilistic learning algorithms for remote
sensing, with applications to cognitive radar.

For his post-doctoral work, he joined Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium in 2008, where he worked on the development of low-complexity, battery-efficient satellite communications.

He served as a research faculty in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Dalhousie University, between 2015 and 2018, where he worked on the development of large–scale MIMO-OFDM techniques. He also taught Communication Systems during this appointment.

In 2018, he founded Marecomms Inc. to design and implement a robust and broadband underwater acoustic communications solutions, which is his current full time occupation.

Dr. Güntürkün is the author of various scholarly articles published in IEEE journals and proceedings. He has also served as a reviewer for several IEEE transactions.

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