A Study on the OFDM System with Clipping Method for Underwater Communication

Recently, the necessity of underwater acoustic communication and demand for transmitting and receiving various data such as voice or high resolution image data are increasing as well. The performance of underwater acoustic communication system is influenced by underwater channel characteristic. Especially, a delay spread caused by reverberation and multi-path induces the ISI (Inter-Symbol-Interference) and reduces the communication performance. In this paper, we study the OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) technique for robust the delay spread in underwater channel. We also use the clipping method to overcome the performance degradation in high PAPR (Peak-to-Average Power Ratio). We confirm the performances of underwater communication system by the underwater channel model simulation model and experiment in small water tank, As a result, the multi-carrier modulation with clipping method presented low BER and the previous single carrier modulation had high BER.