Underwater acoustic communication based on Pattern Time Delay Shift Coding (PDS) communication scheme is studied. The time delay shift values of the pattern are used to encode the digital information in the PDS scheme, which belongs to the Pulse Position Modulation (PPM). The duty cycle of the PDS scheme is small, so it can economize the power for communication. By use of different patterns for code division and different frequencies for channel division, the communication system is capable of mitigating the inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by the multipath channel. The data rate of communication is 1000 bits/s at 8 kHz bandwidth. The receiver separates the channels by means of band-pass filters, and performs decoding by 4 copy-correlators to estimate the time delay shift value. Based on the theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, the PDS scheme is shown to be a robust and effective approach for underwater acoustic communication.