Performance of multicarrier cooperative communication systems over underwater acoustic channels

Multicarrier transmission in the form of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is an efficient method to handle inter-symbol interference resulting from the frequency selectivity of the underwater acoustic (UWA) channels. OFDM can be further combined with cooperative transmission to benefit from the spatial diversity advantages and improve the performance over conventional point-to-point UWA communication systems. In this study, the authors consider a cooperative OFDM UWA communication system and investigate the outage performance for both amplify-and-forward relaying and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. They derive expressions for bounds on outage probability and outage capacity. Monte Carlo simulations corroborate and quantify the enhanced performance of cooperative OFDM UWA communication compared with direct transmission systems. Through numerical simulations, they investigate the impact of geometry on outage probability and signal-to-noise ratio requirements in cooperative OFDM UWA communication with DF relaying. Furthermore, the authors analyse the effects of relay location and carrier frequency on the outage probability for both relaying schemes.