Underwater Acoustic Communication With Multicarrier Binary Frequency Shift Keying

This article describes a novel approach for robust and reliable underwater acoustic communication targeting low data rate applications in very challenging channels. The well-known binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) modulation is extended with multiple pair-wise BFSK subcarriers forming a multicarrier (MC) waveform referred to as MC-BFSK. Time offsets between neighboring subcarriers combined with windowing and guard periods are employed to increase the robustness against Doppler-induced frequency spread/shift and reverberation together with novel methods for synchronization, peak-to-average-power ratio reduction, and soft-value extraction. For the design of the parameters of the waveform, a heuristic approach is utilized. A noncoherent matched filter receiver with spatial diversity is adopted. The MC-BFSK transmission scheme is evaluated by means of computer simulations as well as sea-trial measurements. The obtained results are compared with competing modulation schemes where the proposed MC-BFSK shows better performance in challenging channels. In particular, we are able to decode frames in a sea-trial scenario where the direct path between the transmitter and the receiver is blocked by an island.