Application of OFDM in Underwater Magnetic Induction Communication

Magnetic induction (MI) communication is widely used in underground and underwater environments. However, there is a large path loss in MI system and the 3-dB bandwidth of the system is narrow, which means that the available bandwidth of the communication system is limited. It is important to increase the number of bits per unit bandwidth. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) can effectively improve the spectrum efficiency. In this paper, OFDM is used in the underwater MI communication system model and compared with the single carrier modulation in terms of spectrum efficiency and bit error rate. The results indicate that the underwater MI using OFDM modulation is better than the single carrier modulation in spectrum efficiency.