Impact of Inter-Channel Interference on Shallow Underwater Acoustic OFDM Systems

Abstract: This paper investigates the impacts of Inter-Channel Interference (ICI) effects on a shallow underwater acoustic (UWA) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) communication system. Considering both the turbulence of the water surface and the roughness of the bottom, a stochastic geometry-based channel model utilized for a wide-band transmission scenario has been exploited to derive a simulation model. Since the system bandwidth and the sub-carrier spacing is very limited in the range of a few kHz, the channel capacity of a UWA system is severely suffered by the ICI effect. For further investigation, we construct the signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio (SINR) based on the simulation model, then evaluate the channel capacity. Numerical results show that the various factors of a UWA-OFDM system as subcarriers, bandwidth, and OFDM symbols affect the channel capacity under the different Doppler frequencies. Those observations give hints to select the good parameters for UWA-OFDM systems.