Underwater acoustic FBMC communication with multiple mode index modulation

In underwater acoustic communication (UWA), there is a significant presence of multipath and Doppler spread. The integration of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with index modulation (IM), utilizing subcarrier index modulation to enhance system performance underwater, has garnered considerable interest from researchers. Multiple mode modulation can enhance utilization by transmitting symbols of different modes on different subcarriers. Inspired by the concepts of index modulation and multiple mode modulation, this paper proposes a method that combines multiple mode indexing with the filter bank multicarrier system (MM-FBMC-IM), enabling the transmission of different modulation orders on each subcarrier to increase system flexibility. Simulations demonstrate that under the same spectral efficiency, multiple mode indexing FBMC offers superior bit error rate (BER) performance compared to conventional FBMC and index modulation FBMC.