OSDM Based Underwater Acoustic Communication

Abstract

Underwater acoustic (UWA) communication is an ongoing challenge because of the heavy time spread by multipath and Doppler spreads. In this paper, UWA communication system using orthogonal signal-division multiplexing (OSDM) has been proposed, a scheme that measures the multipath profile without an adaptation or interpolation process, to achieve stable communication in doubly spread channels. The performance of an OFDM scheme in a UWA communication system is already evaluated in simulations. In the present study, the performance of OSDM and existing communication schemes and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) with respect to communication quality, and calculation complexity. From that OSDM with a multichannel receiver is attractive in terms of communication quality; it achieved a far better bit error rate (BER) performance compared to the other schemes with various input signal-to-noise ratios, although the complexity is less than that achieved with OFDM. Based on these findings, we suggest that OSDM can provide a highly reliable communication environment for UWA communication with multipath and Doppler spread, such as in shallow water.