2016 International Conference on Advanced Communication Control and Computing Technologies (ICACCCT)
Review on Enhanced Data Rate Receiver
Design using Efficient Modulation Techniques
for Underwater Acoustic Communication
Ravi Kumar M.G.1
Research Assistant (E&C), REVA University,
Bengaluru-64
ravimg9591@gmail.com
Abstract: Underwater acoustic (UWA) transmission
schemes are an interesting area of communication
research, in which achieving high data rate, low latency
and high throughput is challenging task. In this paper, we
trying to provide a survey on various efficient techniques
which that includes channel estimation, channel
equalization and efficient modulation schemes to achieve
high data rate in the receiver using OFDM scheme for
underwater acoustic communication. We are focusing for
designing a block-by-block iterative receiver for
underwater MIMO-OFDM that includes channel
estimation with highly efficient modulation techniques for
underwater acoustic communication. Also we found some
efficient modulation techniques like BPSK, DPSK and 16-
QAM for underwater channel communication which are
best in achieving high data rate by considering more
subcarriers.
Keywords: Underwater acoustic communication, MIMO-
OFDM, LDPC.
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Underwater Acoustic Communication
Acoustic communications is defined as
communication methods from one point to another by
using acoustic signals. Acoustic signal is the only
physical feasible tool that works in underwater
environment. Several papers are surveyed and so many
studies have been done on research and development of
UWA communication systems over the past 30 years
[1–13]. The Regarding design concept the underwater
network is very similar to that of a land-based network.
Underwater channel is a time varying multipath
channel causing Inter Symbol Interference, Inter
Carrier Interference and channel fading. Because of the
detrimental effect of time spreading and frequency
spreading, obtaining high data rate in underwater
wireless communication is challenging. Arrival of
multiple delay paths causes time spreading and
attenuation. The reflection loss induces frequency-
dependent path loss on each path causing time
spreading. The frequency spreading of the underwater
channel caused by the time varying dynamic motion of
the medium and the movement between the transmitter
and receiver.
ISBN No.978-1-4673-9545-8
Mrinal Sarvagya2
Professor (E&C), REVA University, Bengaluru-64
mrinalsarvagya@gmail.com
B. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing
(OFDM) combined with multi-input multi-output
(MIMO) systems yields a robust underwater
communication technique which improves the data
transmission rates and reliability [10–22]. The effective
underwater communication is usually affected by the
factors such as large transmission delays, deep
multipath fading, highly time-varying channels, and
high power consumption. The underwater channels are
band-limited in nature and bandwidth efficient
transmission techniques play important role.
OFDM in the form of Multi-carrier modulation
technique finds its application in highly dispersive
channel and is suitable for achieving high data rate in
frequency selective underwater channels. The
frequency-selective wide-band channel is transformed
into flat frequency narrowband channels, leading to
robust communication in large delay spread channels.
OFDM allows overlapping between the subcarriers and
hence the available limited channel bandwidth can be
efficiently utilized. Using IFFT/FFT techniques,
implementation of modulation and demodulation is
computationally efficient.
C. Bit Error Rate and Signal to Noise Ratio
The bit error rate (BER) is the number of bit
errors per unit time. In other way it is defined as the
ratio of number of errors occurred to the total number
of bits sent. The BER can be expressed mathematically
as:
—„‡”‘ˆ””‘”•‘……—””‡†
 ൌ
‘–ƒŽ—„‡”‘ˆ‹–•‡–
BER(dB)=20log10(BER) (1)
The SNR is defined as:
‹‰ƒŽ‘™‡”
 ൌ
‘‹•‡‘™‡”
SNR(dB)=20log10 (SNR) (2)
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 2016 International Conference on Advanced Communication Control and Computing Technologies (ICACCCT)
SNR is a key parameter which is usually employs in
the evaluation of performance quality of a
communication link. As the SNR increases the
performance quality of the communication link also
increases and if the medium between the transmitter
and receiver is good then the SNR will be more, so
BER will become very less. We have seen that by
considering the energy per bit to noise power spectral
density ratio (Eb/No), the BER might be affected by
various parameters. We can see that by changing the
controllable variable, it is possible to achieve the
performance which is required for our system.
D. Interference:
By external factors which are present in a
system the interference levels will be set and these
levels are not altered by the main system design. If we
reduce the bandwidth, then the level of interference
will be reduced by good amount.
E.Reduce bandwidth: We may also use another way is
that by reducing the available bandwidth the BER will
be reduced.
F. Increase transmitter power:
We may also boost the power level of the system,
hence the power per bit is improved. It should be
balanced against interference levels factors.
BER (Bit error rate) is an important factor that gives
us an exceptional clue for the performance of a data
link. In any data link the number of errors is one of the
important factors, but the BER (bit error rate) is a key
parameter.
There are so many ways to achieve the efficient
data rate at the receiver in underwater communication
namely, efficient modulation techniques and efficient
channel coding and equalization techniques, etc. There
are so many digital modulation techniques which are
well flourished in the communication field, choice of a
suitable modulation technique for an application
depends on many parameters such as data rate, bit error
rate and design complexity etc. This survey paper
includes so many techniques to achieve the efficient
data rate by using the different modulation techniques
and channel estimation techniques.
Coding theory is the study of the properties of
codes and their fitness for a specific application. In
general, codes are used for data compression,
cryptography, and error-correction. More recently
codes are also used for network coding. The coding
theory typically involves the removal of redundancy
and the correction (or detection) of errors in the
transmitted data. Channel encoding adds extra data bits
to make the transmission of data more robust to
obstacles which are present in the transmission
channel. Turbo code and LDPC codes are the examples
for channel coding. Thus the detailed introduction
about underwater acoustic communication is given in
the section 1. The section 2 describes the related
works; the section 3 describes the proposed works, the
section 4 gives the simulation results and finally the
section 5 describes the conclusion and future work.
II. RELATED WORKS
We have seen more improvements in the wireless
communication field using radio frequency in the last
decades. However, the underwater communications not
grown up so quickly and nowadays to improve this
technology there is a great demand created in the
market. Because of many challenges faced in the use of
undersea channels, such as seasonal variations, fast
attenuation and multipath propagation the transmission
using high speed connection in this ambient is a big
challenge. To overcome all these challenges many
researchers done so many works on underwater
acoustic communication to achieve efficient
transmission by using various techniques and
procedures. Some of the works are listed as shown
below:
Md. Golam Sadeque published an article [16] in
which, three basic types of digital modulation
techniques and their results are discussed. Then by
using MATLAB Simulink model for FSK, PSK and
QAM modulation techniques the bit error rate
performance characteristics of receiver are evaluated.
Using MATLAB Monte Carlo simulation tool their
BER have been evaluated for additive white Gaussian
noise channel. There are so many different types of
channel used in wireless communication. In this article,
the AWGN channel is used as the communication
media between transmitter and receiver. This work
concentrated more on the characterization mechanism
and the design of analog signal waveforms which carry
digital information and compares their performance on
an AWGN channel. Based on the results they
concluded that the 8-array PSK is better than 16-ary
PSK and 8-DPSK has better performance than 16-
DPSK. It is also seen from the results that compare to
other higher order FSK, BFSK has better performance.
The authors found that for M-array modulation, if the
value of M increases the performance of the system
will be degraded. They have concluded based on the
simulation results depending on the bit error rate that
BPSK is the most effective modulation schemes in a
practical communication system.
Chin-Feng Lin, Wen-ChinWu, and Jenny Chih-Yu
Lee [17] are proposed a transmission mechanism based
on MIMO-OFDM for underwater acoustic multimedia
(UWAM) communication. The proposed method
integrates the direct mapping and space-time block
code strategies, OFDM, a power assignment
mechanism, adaptive modulation technique and
unequal error protection in a UWAM system. Their
proposed UWAM system employs high power, low
speed modulation techniques with providing significant
error protection for transmission of sensor data
messages requiring a severe bit-error rate. Based on the
simulation results they concluded that their proposed
technique not only fulfils the quality of services
requirements of a UWAM system, but also improves
transmission bit rates or reduce the transmission power
requirements.
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 2016 International Conference on Advanced Communication Control and Computing Technologies (ICACCCT)
Deepak Sharma and Praveen Srivastava [18],
presented a paper in which a user interface is designed
by using GUI tool of MATAB which helps us to
analyze the performance of OFDM system in terms of
SNR vs. BER variation. BPSK, QPSK and QAM
modulation schemes are analyzed with reference to
OFDM processing. The Rayleigh fading channel and
Multipath fading channel can be used as a
communication channel or media. Based on the models
of BPSK techniques, Simulink models can be designed
for other techniques also.
Jun Ling, Tarik Yardibi, Xiang Su, Hao He, and
Jian Li [19], presented a paper in which they have
concentrated on the various aspects of using a MIMO
acoustic communications system in an underwater
environment where delay spread is present. In this
article they classified the problem into two main
categories (a) channel estimation which includes the
design of the training sequences and the design of the
algorithm to estimate the channel coefficients using the
training sequences or previously detected symbols, and
(b) symbol detection. They have presented the cyclic
approach with good auto and cross correlation
properties for designing training sequences. Iterative
Adaptive Approach (IAA) combined with Bayesian
information criterion (BIC) and RELAX algorithm was
presented as a method for estimating the channel
impulse response (CIR). This is shown via simulations
that Iterative Adaptive Approach outperforms
Matching pursuit (MP) type of algorithms with
arbitrary training sequences and it was shown via
experimental data that IAA provides better results than
MP type of algorithms when the number of symbols
used for updating the channel is relatively less. An
extension to the widely used V-BLAST algorithm,
namely, RELAX-BLAST, has been proposed to
improve detection performance. The validity of the
presented technique was shown via both simulations
and field data from the RACE’08 experiment.
Hamada Esmaiel and Danchi Jiang [20], presented a
review article, in their work they done so much survey
on multicarrier communication schemes used for data
transmission over the underwater acoustic channel and
their work includes underwater channel model and its
difficulties in multicarrier communication modulation
such as OFDM and FBMC, the advances of underwater
acoustics technology applications and areas emerged
in, channel characteristics and channel models in the
reduction of noise and channel noise estimates, the
detailed description of multicarrier modulation and
MIMO schemes for underwater communication,
discussion of doppler estimation and underwater
channel estimation difficulties and techniques and
evaluation of performance for different channel coder
used for underwater acoustic multicarrier modulation.
Adriana F. de A. Oliveira, Eduardo R. Vale, and
Julio C. Dal Bello [21] presented a work on underwater
acoustic communication. The aim of their work is to
give academic studies in this area and try to implement
communication systems which can be used to attend
modern market needs. In this work, a simulation will
be done to compare the gains that can be obtained
using Alamouti technique combined with OFDM,
when compared to a technique using only OFDM. The
main objective of this work is to check the efficiency
of the MIMO schemes applied to underwater channels
and also its combination with OFDM. By considering
that all the parameters in the systems remained the
same, the two techniques were compared base on the
simulation results and an expected performance
improvement was observed in the technique 2. The
improvements in the symbols decodification and error
rate can be ascribed to the use of the Alamouti
technique, combined with OFDM technique. Finally
they concluded that compare to OFDM technique, the
Alamouti technique combined with OFDM will give
provide better performance.
Liang Zhao and Jianhua Ge [22] presented an
article in which they combined soft Minimum Mean
Square Error (MMSE) technique and the serially
concatenated trellis coded modulation (SCTCM)
decoding to implement an iterative receiver for single
carrier(SC) underwater acoustic point to point
communications in time-frequency domain (TFD). The
calculation complexity of equalization can be
minimized by the use of the iterative procedure and
they show that by using less receiving elements we
can get better performance. Finally they used sound
speed profile (SSP) measured in the lake and Bellhop
model to simulate underwater channel to evaluate the
performance of their proposed receiver algorithms.
Based on Frequency domain equalization (FDE) and
time domain SCTCM decoding they designed the
single carrier transmission system with iterative
receiver in time-frequency domain. The proposed
receiver technique has two advantages. First one is the
performance of equalizer can be enhanced by utilizing
decoding gain provided by SCTCM decoder and the
other one is, they used simpler equalization processing
and less receiving elements to obtain reliable data
transmission. In this paper we can found some
limitations like they considered only single carrier
transmission instead of multi-carrier transmission and
they used less receiving elements.
Irfan Ali presented an article [23] “Bit-Error-Rate
Simulation Using MATLAB”, in which he proves that
the Bit error rate is a performance indicator that
provides an excellent indication of the performance of
any data link such as radio or fiber optic system.
Knowledge of the BER also enables other
characteristics of the link such as the bandwidth and
power, etc to be tailored to enable the required
performance to be obtained. Bit error rate testing, is a
powerful mechanism for end to end testing of digital
transmission systems. A BER test gives a measurable
and useful indication of the performance of the system
which can be directly related to its operational
performance. The system performance will noticeably
degrade if the BER rises too high and the system will
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 2016 International Conference on Advanced Communication Control and Computing Technologies (ICACCCT)

operate satisfactorily if it is within limits. He simulated
the Bit-error-rate performance of digital
communication system by inserting a controlled
amount of noise to the transmitted signal and then this
noisy signal will becomes the input to the receiver. The
receiver demodulates the transmitted signal, generating
a sequence of recovered bits. He compared the
received bits to the transmitted bits and checked the
errors through BER versus Eb/No plot. In this article we
can find some useful discussions regarding bit error
calculation using matlab in AWGN channel. The same
scheme will give better performance Based on the Bit
Error Rate (BER) performance. We can say that the
QPSK, DPSK and 16-QAM are the best modulation
schemes for underwater channel which is Rayleigh
fading channel and their BER will be 0.1813dB,
0.1328dB and 0.1858dB respectively with respect to E b
/No. The simulation results are shown in the figures 1,
2 and 3 by comparing the simulation BER with their
theoretical BER values.
10
0
Performance of BER in Rayleigh Channel for QPSK

procedure we can incorporate to underwater channel theory

simulation
and in this article he considered only BPSK signal. We 10
-1

can apply this procedure for other modulation

techniques like QAM and QPSK etc, to achieve high 10
-2

Bit Error Rate

data rate in a multicarrier transmission system.
-3
10
III. PROPOSED WORK
-4

Our main objective for designing the efficient 10

Transceiver is to enhance the data rate. To achieve this -5

objective we proposed highly efficient modulation 10

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
EbNo, dB
techniques for underwater communication. In this
paper we established some efficient modulation Figure 1. Performance of BER in Rayleigh channel for
techniques such as QPSK, DPSK and 16-QAM for QPSK
underwater acoustic communication in order to get
high data rates by considering more subcarriers (256 10
0
Performance of BER in Rayleigh Channel for DPSK

subcarriers).We will use the pilot symbols and cyclic theory

simulation
prefix to avoid the interference effect. By using the 10
-1

FFT/IFFT algorithms the computation will be easy for

the implementation. The parameters we considered for 10
-2
Bit Error Rate

this experiment are listed in the table (1).

TABLE.I OFDM SIGNAL PARAMETERS USED 10
-3

FOR THE EXPERIMENT

No of subcarriers 256 10
-4

Cyclic prefix length 16

Sampling period of channel 1e-3 10
-5

Max Doppler frequency shift 0 0 1 2 3 4 5

Eb/No, dB
6 7 8 9 10

No of OFDM frames 1000 Figure 2. Performance of BER in Rayleigh channel for

FFT size 256 DPSK
No of pilot symbols 4
Modulation schemes QPSK, DPSK, 10
0
Performance of BER in Rayleigh Channel for 16-QAM

16-QAM theory
simulation
-1
10

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

-2
10
Bit Error Rate

In this work our main objective is to achieve

enhanced data rate in the receiver for underwater 10
-3

acoustic communication using efficient modulation

techniques with OFDM and efficient channel 10
-4

estimation techniques. To achieve our objective so

many ways are there but in this paper we focused on 10
-5

finding the efficient modulation techniques which are 0 1 2 3 4 5

Eb/No, dB
6 7 8 9 10

suitable for the underwater channel to meet our

Figure (3). Performance of BER in Rayleigh channel
objectives. We concentrated more on the modulation
for 16-QAM
schemes like QPSK, DPSK and 16-QAM. These
schemes which give better performance compare to
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
other modulation technique schemes even though in
the presence of channel noise. From the obtained
In this paper, we surveyed so many research works
simulation results, we experimented which modulation
on underwater acoustic communication done by

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 2016 International Conference on Advanced Communication Control and Computing Technologies (ICACCCT)
researchers. In those papers we found that so many
useful works in this area as well as some limitations.
To design the efficient iterative receiver and to achieve
the high data rate so many techniques like by using
efficient modulation techniques and efficient channel
estimation and equalization techniques can be used. In
this paper we found that the modulation techniques
such as QPSK, DPSK and 16-QAM will be suit well in
the underwater acoustic communication channel to
obtain high data rate at the receiver. In future we can
achieve high data rate in the receiver in the other way
by the use of efficient channel estimation and channel
equalization techniques. We can design the 2 x 2
MIMO OFDM to achieve enhanced data rate, low
latency and high throughput and also we can design the
receiver and verify the performance using numerical
simulation and mathematical model.
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