An Underwater Acoustic OFDM System Based on NI CompactDAQ and LabVIEW

Recently the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique has attracted increasing interests in underwater acoustic (UA) communications. In this paper, we present an OFDM-based UA communication system, which is designed based on the National Instruments LabVIEW software and the CompactDAQ device. Details on both the transmitter and receiver system design are discussed. The performance of this UA OFDM system is verified through recent UA communication experiments performed in a tank, in the Canning River, and in the estuary of the Swan River, Western Australia. Experimental results show that the system achieves a reliable bit error rate performance even with high-order modulation schemes. Compared with conventional field-programmable gate array and digital signal processor based designs, the proposed implementation simplifies the prototype design process and reduces the software development time. The proposed system provides a flexible and reconfigurable prototype for researchers to test and validate the performance of UA communication algorithms in real UA channels.