Design and test of a carrier interferometry OFDM system in underwater acoustic channels

Based on our previous work, a novel design of a carrier interferometry (CI) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system had been tested in a real underwater acoustic channel - the experimental pool in Xiamen University. Since the CI/OFDM system is very sensitive to phase offsets, a simplified 2D estimator is used to reconstruct the channel response at the receiver. The performance of the CI/OFDM and OFDM underwater acoustic communication systems had been compared based on Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and BER characteristics. Experiment results showed that the CI/OFDM underwater acoustic communication system could achieve excellent performance.