An In-Phase/Quadrature Index Modulation-Aided Spread Spectrum Communication System for Underwater Acoustic Communication

In a multiple-sequences-spread-spectrum (MSSS) communication system, the transmitted signal is made up of superimposed cyclic shift sequences, each sequence carrying a symbol, so the data rate is inceased. In this context, we propose an in-phase/quadrature index modulation-aided MSSS system (MSSS-I/Q-IM), which achieves higher data rate and better bit-error-rate (BER) performance. The new system maps the additional bits to the cyclic shift length of the superimposed sequences of I/Q branches. The sequences in two branches carry the real and imaginary parts of the M-ary phase-shift-keying (MPSK) symbols, respectively. We derive the theoretical BER of the MSSS-I/Q-IM system over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Then, the simulation experiments of the proposed system and MSSS system over an underwater acoustic channel are analyzed and compared. Finally, field experiments are carried out in the pool environment. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme can achieve higher data rate or better BER performance via adjusting the IM parameter. This is important for the time-variant underwater acoustic transmission environments.