MU-Massive MIMO for UWA Communication

The present paper considers the application of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) to a multi-user (MU) underwater acoustic (UWA) communication system. In the scope to achieve a high throughput within a limited acoustic bandwidth, we consider filterbank multicarrier (FBMC) modulation for waveform shaping instead of the widely used orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). We assess the performance of the system in a 1 km simulated time-varying underwater acoustic channel (UAC) in terms of bit error rate (BER), packet error rate (PER) and maximum achievable throughput. The transmission scenario consists of four users, each one equipped with multiple transmitting hydrophones. We show that the implementation of massive MIMO at the receiver allows all the users to use the same frequency bandwidth to transmit their information reliably to the receiver. Therefore, a high spectral efficiency and throughput can be achieved, making the transmission of multimedia data such as high quality real-time video a reality.