DSP based receiver implementation for OFDM acoustic modems

Significant progress has been made recently on the use of multicarrier modulation in the form of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for high data rate underwater acoustic communications. In this paper, we present implementation results of OFDM acoustic modems under different settings with either one or two parallel data streams transmitted, whose data rate is 3.2 KB/s or 6.4 KB/s, respectively, with QPSK modulation, rate-1/2 channel coding, and signal bandwidth of 6 kHz. To achieve real time operation, the processing time for each OFDM block shall be (much) less than the block duration of 210 ms. We first implement the receiver algorithms on a floating point TMS320C6713 DSP development board, running at 225 MHz. With convolutional coding, the per-block processing time is about 38 ms and 77 ms for single-input single-output (SISO) and multi-input multi-output (MIMO) settings, respectively, where there are two transmitters and two receivers in the latter case. With nonbinary low-density parity-check (LDPC) coding, which gains about 2 dB in error performance relative to convolutional coding, the per-block processing time increases to 50 ms and 101 ms for SISO and MIMO settings, respectively. We have also implemented the receiver algorithms using a fixed-point TMS320C6416 DSP development board, where the DSP core runs at 1 GHz. The per-block processing time reduces by two thirds with negligible performance degradation.