Multicarrier modulation in the form of OFDM has been actively pursued for underwater acoustic communication recently. In this paper, we present a desirable property of OFDM that one signal design can be easily scaled to fit into different transmission bandwidths with negligible changes on the receiver. We have tested the proposed design with data collected from experiments at AUV Fest, Panama City, FL, June 2007, and at the Buzzards Bay, MA, Aug. 2007. With QPSK modulation, we have used different bandwidths from 3 kHz to 50 kHz, leading to data rates from 1.5 kbps to 25 kbps after rate 1/2 coding. With 16-QAM modulation, we have used different bandwidths from 12 kHz to 50 kHz, leading to data rates from 12 kbps to 50 kbps. Excellent BER performance has been achieved, which confirms the flexibility of OFDM under different system setups.
['Baosheng Li', 'Shengli Zhou', 'Jie Huang', 'Peter Willett']
Scalable OFDM design for underwater acoustic communications