Underwater optical wireless communication performance enhancement using 4D 8PAM trellis-coded modulation OFDM with DFT precoding.

Abstract

A 4D 8-pulse amplitude modulation trellis-coded modulation-based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (4D 8PAM TCM-OFDM) scheme combined with discrete Fourier transform (DFT) precoding is proposed and experimentally demonstrated in an underwater optical wireless communications system. It can resist power fading caused by the attenuation, scattering, and reflection in the water channel. The experimental results show that, after transmission over the water-air channel and at the bit error rate of 3.8×10-3, the improvement in the receiver sensitivity is 0.88 dB using the 4D 8PAM TCM-OFDM scheme, compared to the conventional 64QAM-OFDM scheme. In addition, the proposed 4D 8PAM TCM-OFDM scheme combined with DFT precoding can compensate for unbalanced impairments, and it can obtain 1.28 dB receiver sensitivity improvement, compared to the conventional 64QAM-OFDM scheme with DFT precoding.