A multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing underwater communication system using vector transducers

Abstract

Vector sensors and transducers are compact multichannel devices that can be used for underwater communication via acoustic particle velocity channels (A. Abdi and H. Guo, “A new compact multichannel receiver for underwater wireless communication networks,” IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 8, pp. 3326-3329, 2009). In this paper, a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) underwater acoustic communication system is presented using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. Upon transmitting multiple independent data streams simultaneously over several channels, this MIMO system can increase the transmission rate, whereas the OFDM modulation mitigates the highly frequency selective underwater channels. Various components of the system including vector transducers and algorithms for synchronization, channel estimation, MIMO detection, channel coding, etc., are designed and implemented. Using this system, experiments are conducted to measure and study acoustic particle velocity channels in the MIMO setup. Additionally, system performance parameters such as bit error rate and spectral efficiency are measured and discussed for various conditions and configurations, to understand the performance of the developed vector MIMO-OFDM system. [The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Grant IIP-1500123.]