Pilot allocation design and experimental results for underwater OFDM systems

In this paper, performance of an underwater acoustic OFDM system is studied for various pilot allocation schemes having different pilot spacings in the frequency and time domain. The underwater OFDM system is first developed to support different pilot allocation schemes, and the experiments is conducted at the western sea near Janggohang, South Korea in July 2016. The system performance is, then, evaluated in terms of effective spectral efficiency and BER for different pilot allocation schemes. Analysis based on the measurements suggests the pilot allocation method showing good tradeoff between spectral efficiency and BER.