Experimental assessment of a multicarrier underwater acoustic communication system

This paper presents a multicarrier communication system which transmits information on independent subcarriers to achieve an increased data rate. For this system, a passive-phase conjugation (PPC) based receiver structure is assessed by processing data collected in sea trials. Based on temporal diversity (pulse compression) exploited by PPC processing, an adaptive multichannel decision feedback equalizer is used to remove intersymbol interference, where spatial diversity is exploited by adaptive multichannel combination. The digital phase-locked loop (DPLL) technique is implemented for carrier-phase tracking. In the scenario of low input signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the receiver structure achieved superior performance using a common DPLL. In a depth-fluctuated environment, two sea experiments were conducted over ranges of 2 km and 4 km, respectively, and this communication system was assessed with a data rate of 4 kbps. In terms of mean square error, output SNR and bit error rate, this receiver structure has demonstrated its performance for the multicarrier communication system.