Modeling and Simulation of Underwater Acoustic Communication Systems

Rafael S. Chaves, Wallace A. Martins, Paulo S. R. Diniz

DOI: 10.14209/sbrt.2017.218

Evento: XXXV Simpósio Brasileiro de Telecomunicações e Processamento de Sinais (SBrT2017)

Keywords: OFDM Underwater Acoustic Channel Doppler Effect

Abstract

This work describes a simple model for underwater acoustic (UWA) channels, taking into account Doppler effects. The performance of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems in UWA channels is also studied. The impact of Doppler effects on OFDM transmissions is thoroughly investi- gated, and a simple two-step compensation strategy is described. In order to evaluate UWA models, a versatile UWA channel simulator is developed and some simulations are performed to measure the OFDM performance for time-variant channels. Those simulations evaluate the bit-error-rate and sensitivity of OFDM systems to Doppler effects. The results are satisfactory and show that only one compensation step is necessary to maintain a reasonable system performance for relative estimation errors of Doppler scaling factor in the order of 10−5, corroborating that OFDM systems are suitable in some specific scenarios.

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