Robustness verification of an OFDM system for shallow water communication

The severe time-varying multipath effect of underwater acoustic (UWA) channels has posed a great challenge for shallow water communication system design. Although existing literature has demonstrated that multicarrier modulation in the form of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM) is an effective technique to deal with severe multipath effect of UWA channels, the experiments of medium distance OFDM UWA communication in shallow water are insufficient. In this paper, a specific OFDM UWA communication system design with experimental results from a reservoir test conducted in Danjiangkou Reservoir in China as well as its comparison against single-carrier UWA systems has been offered. The experimental results demonstrated that the performance of OFDM system is significantly robust in shallow water. Therefore OFDM is a practical choice for stable UWA communication, especially when the multipath delay of UWA channel is very large.