A natural joint physical and link layer transmission architecture is developed for communication over underwater acoustic channels, based on the concept of super-Nyquist (SNQ) signaling. In such systems, the signaling rate is chosen significantly higher than the Nyquist rate of the system. We show that such signaling can be used in conjunction with good "off- the-shelf" base codes, simple linear redundancy, and minimum mean-square error decision feedback equalization (MMSE-DFE) to produce highly efficient, low complexity rateless (i.e., "fountain") codes for the severe time-varying intersymbol-interference channels typical of this application. We show that not only can SNQ rateless codes approach capacity arbitrarily closely, but even particularly simple SNQ-based rateless codes require the transmission of dramatically fewer packets than does traditional ARQ with Chase combining.
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