Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access for Underwater Acoustic Communications

A single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) scheme for transmission through underwater acoustic channel is proposed in this paper. A uniform distributed mode is used for the subcarrier mapping at the transmitter side. A single user scenario is considered where empty subcarriers between each two successive occupied subcarriers are considered as a guard interval. This enables to increase the receiver robustness against Doppler spread compared to traditional single-carrier transmission schemes. Adaptive linear frequency-domain equalization is considered at the receiver. Results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the single-carrier frequency-domain equalization transmission scheme (SC-FDE) in terms of bit error rate (BER) and mean square error (MSE).