Performance Analysis of a Pipeline Dispersion-Compensation Receiver in Acoustic Communication Experiments

Acoustic signals propagating in a pipeline waveguide exhibit pronounced dispersion, leading to waveform broadening and distortion. This paper proposes a compensation receiver based on a pipeline dispersion-compensation transform and evaluates its performance in pipeline acoustic communication experiments. The proposed receiver not only compensates for the waveform-spreading effects of multiple modes simultaneously but also improves symbol-decision accuracy through weighted combination of multimodal energy. The experiments employed differential binary phase-shift keying (DBPSK) modulation and a direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) communication system. Using the proposed receiver, error-free demodulation was achieved in simulations. Moreover, in a real pipeline experiment with an inner diameter of 0.08 m and a length of 47.6 m, error-free communication was also achieved. Further analysis shows that the proposed receiver provides an additional performance gain of approximately 2 dB compared with a conventional receiver—a gain of practical significance for pipeline communications under strong noise, long-distance transmission, and multimodal dispersion.