Generalized frequency division multiplexing–based acoustic communication for underwater systems

Summary The underwater (UW) acoustic channel poses multiple challenges like coloured ambient noise, frequency‐dependent attenuation, and doubly selective fading. The availability of a robust underwater communication mechanism can largely enhance the success of human effort in a multitude of applications, ranging from pollution surveillance to defence and search/rescue operations. In this work, generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM), a non‐orthogonal multicarrier scheme, which has recently been studied for terrestrial wireless fading channels, is developed and tested for signalling in UW acoustic communication. UW noise, attenuation, and doubly selective fading channels are modelled with appropriate statistics. The BER performance of proposed system is systematically evaluated under different channel conditions, starting from simple additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels to a horizontally configured UW channel. The performance is also compared with contemporary orthogonal frequency‐division multiplexing (OFDM)– and filter bank multicarrier (FBMC)–based systems. A robust UW communication mechanism is essential for countless applications. Generalized frequency division multiplexing, a non‐orthogonal multicarrier scheme, is developed and tested for signalling in Underwater (UW) acoustic communication. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated in presence of UW noise, attenuation, doubly selective fading channel with 5 and 10‐taps, high Doppler shifts, and a horizontally configured acoustic channel. The error performance is at par with or better than FBMC/OFDM‐based systems under identical parameters with reduced computational complexity.