MIMO-OFDM for High-Rate Underwater Acoustic Communications

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have been actively pursued recently in underwater acoustic communications to increase the data rate over the bandwidth-limited channels. In this communication, we present a MIMO system design, where spatial multiplexing is applied with orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) signals. The proposed receiver works on a block-by-block basis, where null subcarriers are used for Doppler compensation, pilot subcarriers are used for channel estimation, and a MIMO detector consisting of a hybrid use of successive interference cancellation and soft minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalization is coupled with low-density parity-check (LDPC) channel decoding for iterative detection on each subcarrier. The proposed design has been tested using data recorded from three different experiments. A spectral efficiency of 3.5 b/s/Hz was approached in one experiment, while a data rate of 125.7 kb/s over a bandwidth of 62.5 kHz was achieved in another. These results suggest that MIMO-OFDM is an appealing solution for high-data-rate transmissions over underwater acoustic channels.