OFDM over Underwater Acoustic Channel with Large and Small Scale Fading

About 70% of earth surface is covered with sea water, an area that is few explored in communication. Investigating submarine communications can be strategic and a competitive advantage to countries with long coast. This work aims at evaluating through software prototypes the performance of a communication over underwater acoustic channel (UAC) subject to large and small scale fading. The submarine channel modeling follows Bellhop algorithm along with small scale fading. OFDM over submarine channel is compared to frequency selective time-varying classical wireless channel in order to investigate the effects concerning temporal and frequency scattering. Thus, the analysis is based on OFDM system, in which, besides data rate increase by subcarrier multiplexing, it can mitigate the traditional wireless multipath fading. After presenting the submarine channel models and the related works to this paper proposal, we provides the evidences of the difference between the models presented and the similarities of BER performance for the channels analyzed.