Adaptive Modulation and Coding for Underwater Acoustic OFDM

Underwater acoustic channels are fast varying spatially and temporally according to environmental conditions. Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is appealing for underwater acoustic communications to improve the system efficiency by matching transmission parameters to channel variations. In this paper, we construct an AMC system with a finite number of transmission modes in the context of underwater orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). We propose the effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) computed after channel estimation and channel decoding as a new performance metric for mode switching, which is shown to predict the system performance more consistently than the input SNR and the pilot SNR. Real-time AMC tests have been conducted in a recent sea experiment to maximize the transmission rate with a given transmission power.