A study of multicarrier modulation schemes for underwater acoustic communications

Underwater acoustic (UWA) communication attracts lots of attention due to its rapid development in maritime applications. In order to meet the increasing service requirements, multicarrier modulation techniques are desired for underwater communication implementations. In this paper, we study three types of multicarrier modulation schemes, e.g., the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), the filtered multitone (FMT) modulation and the staggered multitone (SMT) modulation. By considering the practical UWA channel environments, we analyze the simulation results and compare the pros and the cons among these three multicarrier modulation schemes.