An analysis of MIMO-OFDM for shallow water acoustic communications

Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) techniques are currently extensively considered in underwater acoustic (UWA) communications to overcome the bandwidth limitation of under-sea channel. Associated with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation, MIMO techniques provide substantial gain in spectral efficiency and fair robustness against frequency fading while keeping simple equalizer structure. In this paper, we study accurately the gain provided by MIMO-OFDM paradigm over Shallow Water Acoustic (SWA) channel by taking into account channel characteristics as well as OFDM parameters.