Performance evaluation of filterbank multicarrier systems in an underwater acoustic channel

Abstract

This paper examines the performance of filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) systems for underwater acoustic communications. We evaluate the performance of Filtered Multitone (FMT) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing-Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OFDM-OQAM) and compare it to that of traditional OFDM. OFDM-OQAM is found to be the most suitable multicarrier technique that can be applied to underwater acoustic communications as it achieves maximum bandwidth efficiency and provides a higher bit rate than its OFDM counterpart due to the absence of a cyclic prefix (CP). We also present a bit error rate (BER) performance evaluation of coded and un-coded OFDM-OQAM for both horizontally and vertically configured acoustic channels.