Development of OFDM technique for underwater communication in system on chip

This paper describes the hardware development of an underwater communication system using FPGA technology. The hardware device involves implementation of high-performance signal processing that also includes the platform's hardware, HDL, and software designs. A Microzed board is used to implement the underwater communication system which consists of Xlinix Zync-7000. The proposed work is broken down into two steps. The first stage involves creating OFDM Simulink blocks in Matlab, and the second involves transferring these Simulink blocks to SoC boards. 64-QAM modulation is used to map the OFDM symbol. Transmitter and receiver blocks are implemented on two SoC target devices. The data from both devices is transferred using the AXI-stream bus. The SoC devices employ a handshake logic as an acknowledgment mechanism. The findings of Matlab Simulink are compared to the decoded received bits from the SoC device. The performance of the system is presented in terms of BER and the dynamic power utilized by the device. The BER values are calculated theoretically and compared with the practical value of BER and from the result, it is observed that the BER value of the proposed method is 2% lower than the theoretical BER calculations. The Zynq SoC device uses 0.051 W of dynamic power with the logic loaded. The suggested hardware configuration is more useful and appropriate for real-time implementations.