On the analysis of orthogonal chirp division multiplexing for shallow water underwater acoustic communication

This paper describes the use of the novel Orthogonal Chirp Division Multiplex (OCDM) waveform for an end-to-end high data rate underwater acoustic transmission system. The described OCDM based transmission is evaluated over a realistic underwater acoustic (UWA) channel and compared fairly against the conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM). By efficiently exploiting multi-paths diversity of the channel, OCDM is shown to provide better robustness than OFDM especially in case of a underloaded configuration when only a subset of N chirp waveforms are modulated leading to an interesting trade-off between spectral efficiency and robustness against UWA channel impairments.