Precoded IM-OFDM-SS for Underwater Acoustic Communication

Abstract

The nature of the multipath channel and the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) are regarded as the main challenges restricting the design of a multicarrier reliable underwater acoustic (UWA) communication. This paper proposes a new scheme, precoded index modulation orthogonal frequency division modulation spread spectrum (IM-OFDM-SS), for UWA communication. The precoded IM-OFDM-SS is proposed to increase the transmission efficiency and exploit the spreading and multipath diversities and, at the same time, reduce the PAPR to achieve a reliable communication system. Two different precoders, discrete Hartley transform (DHT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT), are utilized in the proposed scheme and compared with the conventional IM-OFDM-SS scheme. Simulation and real experimental results demonstrate the outperformance of the proposed precoded IM-OFDM-SS in comparison to the conventional benchmarks in terms of PAPR and bit error rate (BER) performance.