Superposition Coding for Downlink Underwater Acoustic OFDM

Superposition coding (SC) is a nonorthogonal scheme for downlink communications, in which all users are allowed to use the full degrees of freedom of the channel and successive interference cancellation (SIC) is adopted for user decoding. Combining SC with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation, the optimal resource allocation depends on the perfect channel state information (CSI) of all users at the transmitter, which is hard to obtain for underwater acoustic (UWA) channels. In this paper, we propose a practical OFDM-modulated SC scheme for downlink UWA communications, where the transmitter splits the power between two users based on statistical CSI. The expressions to characterize the boundary of the ergodic rate region achievable by the proposed scheme over long codewords are presented first, followed by the analysis of outage probability when coding is applied within one OFDM block. Then we examine the performance of SC in an OFDM-modulated system with practical coding and modulation pairs. Simulation results show that the OFDM-modulated SC scheme outperforms the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) in performance of both block error rate (BLER) and spectral efficiencies under different data rate pairs. Recorded data from both medium-range and short-range sea tests verify that channel statistics are stable over a long period of time and can be used to assist resource allocation for the proposed scheme. Compared with OFDMA, considerable increase of spectral efficiencies has been found for SC based on experimental data when both users with disparate channels have nonzero data rates.