Underwater acoustic communication using Doppler-resilient orthogonal signal division multiplexing in a harbor environment

Abstract

Underwater acoustic (UWA) channels are one of the historical mobile ultrawideband channels characterized by large delay and Doppler spreads, but reliable UWA communication remains challenging. Here we performed an initial demonstration of the Doppler-resilient orthogonal signal division multiplexing (D-OSDM) technique in an actual sea environment. D-OSDM spreads data symbols in both time and frequency with guardbands to exploit the time and frequency diversity of UWA channels. The experiment was performed in a challenging scenario: the transmitter was fixed on a floating pier, and the receiver was mounted on a moving remote-controlled boat. The harbor UWA channel had a delay spread of 50 ms and a Doppler spread of up to 4.5 Hz, in the presence of additive Gaussian noise, and the combination of two Rayleigh fading models (a two-path model without Doppler spread and a multi-path model with Doppler spread) was able to successfully model the actual environment. Our results also confirmed that a UWA communication link using D-OSDM will deliver excellent reliability even for a harbor UWA channel with a mobile receiver; D-OSDM achieves better communication quality compared to other communication schemes in both simulations and experiments.