Capacity of OFDM Systems Over Fading Underwater Acoustic Channels

In this paper, we derive bounds to the channel capacity of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems over the underwater (UW) acoustic fading channel as a function of the distance between the transmitter and the receiver. The upper bound is obtained under perfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver. The lower bound is obtained assuming the input is drawn from phase-shift keying (PSK) constellation which results in non-Gaussian distribution of the output signal and no CSI. The reduction from the upper bound is due to limited mutual information that can be conveyed by PSK constellation and the linear minimum mean square prediction error. Our UW channel deviates from the wide sense stationary and uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) model commonly used for small bandwidths. We incorporate frequency-dependent path loss due to the acoustic propagation into each arrival path between the transmitter and the receiver. This leads the UW channel to be modeled as a frequency-dependent doubly spread fading channel characterized by the wide sense stationary and correlated scattering (WSS-non-US) fading assumption. Both Rayleigh and Ricean fading assumptions are investigated in our model. Results from the model show a gap between the upper and lower bounds which depends not only on the ranges and shape of the scattering function of the UW channel but also on the distance between the transmitter and the receiver. Our model for the scattering function was suggested by Rescheduled Acoustic Communications Experiment (RACE08) experimental data, leading to a multilag autoregressive (AR-q) model for the fading.