Underwater Acoustic Video Transmission Using MIMO-FBMC

In this paper we assess the transmission of a standard definition (SD) video over a 1000 m vertical time-varying underwater acoustic channel (UAC) using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with spatial multiplexing gain. The MIMO systems are integrated with filter bank multi-carrier (FBMC) modulation and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and their bit error rate (BER) performances are evaluated over the channel using preamble-based channel estimation. In this work we chose to use the FBMC system based on the Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OQAM) as it achieves maximum spectral efficiency. Simulation results show that MIMO-FBMC/OQAM provides a better error performance than MIMO-OFDM in the UAC, outlining its robustness against both time and frequency dispersions. Furthermore, the absence of a cyclic prefix (CP) in FBMC/OQAM implies that more useful bits can be transmitted per second, making it a better candidate than OFDM for transmitting real-time video with acceptable quality over a long acoustic link.