On the Feasibility of OFDM for Long-range Mobile Communications in the Northwest Passage

In this work, the reliability of an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) acoustic conununication link is evaluated in mobile conditions in Barrow Strait over a distance as long as 35 km. To evaluate the factors that affect the communication system, the channel characteristics are first extracted. It is found that the uncoded OFDM transmission link is very sensitive to the propagation conditions. Moreover, the relatively high bitrate equal to 13.125 (4 times that of FSK) motivates further efforts in improving the performance by optimizing the receiver signal processing and OFDM parameters.