OFDM-IDMA communications over underwater acoustic channels

The combination of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and interleave division multiple access (IDMA), known as OFDM-IDMA, has been proposed as a promising multiple access scheme for wireless communications due to its low decoding complexity and potential of achieving high spectral efficiency. However, most of the work on OFDM-IDMA is in radio frequency (RF) communications scenarios and based on computer simulations. In this paper, we propose OFDM-IDMA over underwater acoustic (UWA) channels with experimental results. We also extend the original OFDM-IDMA to a multiple hydrophones scenario to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance. Experimental results show that with multiple hydrophones, the coded BER performance of OFDM-IDMA approaches zero after only a few iterations, validating the feasibility of our proposed approach over UWA channels.