OFDM for Underwater Acoustic Communications

Preface

Underwater acoustic (UWA) channels have been regarded significantly different from wireless radio channels, due to their unique characteristics, such as large temporal variations, abundance of transmission paths, and wideband property in nature. Although there are a plethora of digital and wireless communication textbooks, most of them are tailored towards wireless radio channels, where simplified channel models are usually adopted to streamline presentation. Following standard receiver designs in textbooks, a practitioner might often be frustrated by the receiver performance in real underwater acoustic environments. This book is written to unfold and to address the challenges in UWA communications particularly for the multicarrier modulation in the form of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM).

The last decade has witnessed the tremendous development and revolutionary impact of OFDM on high data-rate radio communications. It is the workhorse of many wireless communication standards, such as WiFi (IEEE 802.11 a/g/n), WiMAX (IEEE 802.16), digital audio and video broadcasting (DAB/DVB), and the fourth generation (4G) cellular systems. The popularity of OFDM stems from its capability to convert a long multipath channel in the time domain into multiple parallel single-tap channels in the frequency domain, thus considerably simplifying receiver design. Such a feature makes OFDM an attractive choice for UWA channels. However, the feasibility of underwater acoustic ...