Effects of the transducer dynamics in underwater acoustic communication

The inter-carrier interference (ICI) of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) symbols, which is caused by the transducer’s dynamics, has been analysed and simulated in this paper. The small Cyclic Prefix (CP) method is proposed to overcome the ICI caused by the transducer in order to maintain the orthogonality between sub-carriers without much loss of the energy and the bandwidth efficiency. The simulation results show that the small CP whose length is longer than the transient response of the transducer can eliminate the ICI problem.