Towards Multicarrier Waveforms Beyond OFDM: Performance Analysis of GFDM Modulation for Underwater Acoustic Channels

In this paper, we assess the performance of a generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) transceiver for underwater acoustic high data-rate transmission. We also present a comprehensive overview of the work done in the field of next generation multicarrier techniques beyond orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for underwater acoustic (UWA) channels. Since very little work has been done in determining the feasibility of acoustic GFDM, we evaluate the performance of proposed GFDM transceiver in terms of spectral efficiency, peak to average power ratio, error rates and complexity using simulations. We employ two types of receivers - matched filter and zero forcing and evaluate their performances for several system configurations. Results presented show that the zero forcing receiver outperforms the matched filter receiver at high SNR values for almost all the configurations; exceptions being the cases where 1
^st
and 4
^th
Xia pulse shapes are employed with higher values of the roll off factor. We also compare the performance of the proposed GFDM transceiver with that of OFDM and show that GFDM outperforms OFDM by almost 4 dB for a symbol error rate of 10
^-2
. It is concluded that while GFDM is computationally more demanding than OFDM, it is still an appealing technique for future UWA communications due to its higher spectral efficiency, flexibility, and better error performance.