Abstract: A multiuser receiver for use in additive white Gaussian noise, multiple-access communication channels. The receiver includes an interference estimator which estimates multiple-access interference signals using a variable weighting provided by a soft decision processor. The interference estimator may receive signals from matched-filter/sample-and-hold circuits, decorrelator circuits, or sliding-window-decorrelator circuits. The soft decision processor is provided having a soft-decision nonlinearity characteristic, which may correspond to a multilevel quantizer characteristic, a dead-zone nonlinearity characteristic, or a linear clipper characteristic.

Abstract: An underwater local area network for oceanographic observation and data acquisition includes a network node for telemetering data to a final destination and a plurality of sensors each of the sensors having an acoustic modem to transmit information to the network node.