A Novel OFDM Approach Using Error Correcting Codes and Continuous Phase Modulation for Underwater Acoustic Communication

Abstract

In this work, the performance of coded continuous phase modulation (CPM) transceivers for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in underwater acoustic channels is evaluated. The proposed technique employs the Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) class of cyclic codes, and a CPM-based mapper is being used in place of a traditional OFDM mapper. Bit-error-rates (BERs) for various distances are evaluated. We use the Bellhop acoustic channel simulator that is considered to be very close to a real underwater channel. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated for 23 values of the CPM modulation index ℎ as a function of the distance between the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx). Based upon the error performance, we identified several best-performing CPM indices. We also observed that for Tx–Rx distances of 100 and 250 m, the proposed system gives acceptable performance without the need for equalization. We also compared the out-of-band radiation of the proposed system with PSK-OFDM and observed that the uncoded CPM-OFDM has a better out-of-band (OOB) performance than the traditional OFDM. Moreover, a comparison of BERs with the traditional PSK-OFDM system shows that the proposed system outperforms the traditional OFDM system by a wide margin.