Nonbinary LDPC Coding for Multicarrier Underwater Acoustic Communication

Recently, multicarrier modulation in the form of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been shown feasible for underwater acoustic communications via effective algorithms to handle the channel time-variability. In this paper, we propose to use nonbinary low density parity check (LDPC) codes to address two other main issues in OFDM: (i) plain (or uncoded) OFDM has poor performance in fading channels, and (ii) OFDM transmission has high peak to average power ratio (PAPR). We develop new methods to construct nonbinary regular and irregular LDPC codes that achieve excellent performance, match well with the underlying modulation, and can be encoded in linear time and in a parallel fashion. Based on the fact that the generator matrix of LDPC codes has high density, we further show how to reduce the PAPR considerably with minimal overhead. Experimental results confirm the excellent performance of the proposed nonbinary LDPC codes in multicarrier underwater acoustic communications.