A low-complexity design of OFDM modulation based on ZFFT

Underwater acoustic communications based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) are realized usually in high frequency for high communication rate, and the channel and hardware conditions make our communication band is limited. Conventional modulation of these OFDM scenarios are FFT, it will face the problem of oversize FFT number and large computation complexity in the conditions of band-limited and high frequency. ZFFT (Zoom-FFT) is one method of spectrum zoom technique, which decreases the computation complexity and FFT number. In this paper, we proposed an OFDM modulation scheme based on ZFFT, and the simulations show that this scheme has lesser computation complexity and FFT number. The trial results of DaLian16, which is in March, 2016 show that ZFFT-OFDM has the good performance with very low bit-error-rate (BER) on the range of 1km.