Performance Evaluation of Underwater
Communication System using Block Codes
B.Pranitha
Research Scholar, Department of ECE
NIT Warangal
Warangal, India
Abstract- Underwater Communications (UWC) is a very
demanding application in spite of issues like
multipath propagation, attenuation of the signal,
noise, and interference etc., Orthogonal Frequency
Multiplexing (OFDM) is a suitable modulation technique for
UWC as it has the ability to solve Inter symbol interference (lSI),
Inter channel interference (ICI) and also multipath propagation.
Bit error rate (BER) versus Signal to noise ratio (SNR) is used as
the figure of merit to indicate the performance of the system. In
this work it is established that coding at the transmitter
addition to OFDM using Hamming code improves the BER. It is
also proved that LDPC code further improves the BER.
Keywords-Underwater communication (UWC),
Frequency division Multiplexing (OFDM),
interference (lSI), Inter channel interference (ICI), Forward error
correction (FEC), Hamming code, Low density
(LDPC) code.
I. INTRODUCTION
Underwater wireless communication (UWC) is an emerging
technology that has been focused on for past two decades. The
evolution of underwater sensor network, submarine
Communications, military applications and remotely operated
vehicles (ROV) started a new area of research. Though most
of the concepts of communication are adopted from radio
frequency (RF) applications, the major problem is to apply
those concepts to the underwater channel [1]. Demand for
UWC is increasing more due to the increase of human
activities in undersea environments such as environmental
monitoring, underwater discovery of animals and oil field
invention. There is also increase in use of robotics underwater.
Remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous
underwater vehicles (AUVs) are usually used in such
applications and an important issue is how to convey
information within them [2]. The four major means of
communication through underwater are by using (i) Acoustic
waves (ii) EM waves (iii) Optical signals (iv) Optical fiber
cables. Cables have robust communication but it is very
difficult to maintain them underwater. EM waves work in
power limited region and they get attenuated rapidly in water.
Optical signals are limited to short distances (less than 100m)
and rapidly absorbed in water, though they can carry more
978-1-5090-2541-1/16/$3l.00 ©2016 IEEE
Dr.L.Anjaneyulu
Associate Professor, Department of ECE
NIT Warangal
Warangal, India
information. So we are left with acoustic signals that can
time varying travel to longer distances. When temperature of water
underwater increases by 1°C, sound speed increase by 1.4 m/s. As the
Division
depth of the water increases by Ikm, sound speed increases by
17 mis, but it is bandwidth limited. The equipment used to
convey information in underwater environments is the general
hydrophone [3] Acoustic underwater propagation is generally
characterized by three factors: attenuation of the signal, time-
in varying multipath propagation, and considerable low speed of
sound (1500 m/s) [4]
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section-II
Orthogonal
describes OFDM. Section-III explains Underwater
Intersymbol
Communication system (UWC). Section-IV gives the
parity check
simulation results followed by conclusions.
II. ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING
(OFDM)
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is an
emerging multicarrier transmission technique that is widely
used in wireless communication. It transmits a bit stream by
dividing in to parallel bit-streams each with low bit rate and
this parallel bit stream is further modulated over several sub-
carriers and then transmitted over additive white Gaussian
noise channel as shown in fig.1. This avoids the overlapping
of each sub-carrier channel thus eliminating inter-carrier
interference (lCI). The basic idea behind OFDM modulation is
nothing but implementing an overlapping multi-carrier
modulation for replacing a wideband signal to simultaneously
transmit narrowband signals. To implement OFDM TX and
RX in discrete time, IFFT and FFT are used respectively. To
reduce inter symbol interference (lSI), OFDM symbol period
should be greater enough than maximum delay spread [5].
Cyclic prefix is introduced to reduce crosstalk between
different subcarriers which raises ICI (Inter channel
interference). OFDM system is able to maximize spectral
efficiency without creating channel interference. The bit
stream is divided to the individual sub-carriers by using a
serial to parallel converter. Each sub-carrier is modulated as
an ideal individual carrier before all the channels are
transmitted. The receiver of the OFDM performs exactly the
reverse process, by dividing the incoming signal into
individual sub-carriers by using a serial to parallel converter
 59

Fig.l.0FDM Functional block

and then demodulation, before reconstructing the original

data bit stream. More clearly, OFDM systems have higher
spectral efficiency, reduced lSI, and overcome multi-path (3)
distortion.

III. UNDERWATER COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

Hk Xk exp(j2tr((
fOffie!) + k)(n + £5) + n(t)
A. OFDMfor Underwater Acoustic Communications
y(n) =
I
k
(4)
=O N
One of the most important reasons for choosing OFDM Where Hk is mUlti-path underwater channel, foffset is carrier
in underwater acoustic communication is in its way to deal frequency offset, n(t) is additive noise, () is sampling offset
with multipath propagation delay and for high bit rate
underwater communication. [6] B. Forward Error Correction

Fig.2 shows the block diagram of OFDM system in
underwater acoustic communication system. The
mathematical expressions are as shown below [7]. In the
transmitter of OFDM, the input data is converted from serial
data to parallel data. After which the modulation of OFDM is
performed by using QPSK and converted to time domain
data using IFFT. To reduce the effect of lSI and confIrm the
orthogonality of sub-carriers, cyclic prefIx is used which
must be larger than the channel delay spread. It is then
converted to serial data.
The transmitted signal is given by
The ability of a receiving station to correct the errors in
the data received after transmission is called forward error
correction (FEC). To operate this, transmitter must add extra
data (called error correction bits). It is a digital signal
processing technique that is used to increase data
consistency. It gives the receiver the profIciency to correct
errors without any reverse channel to retransmit the data. In
this implementation, Hamming codes and LDPC codes have
been used for error correction purposes and the performance
has been compared with respect to Bit error rate (BER)
computation.
(i) Hamming code

LXkexp(j� nk)
N-I
2
sen) For an (n, k) Hamming code, 'k' is the number of input
k=O
=

N bits and 'n' is the number of output bits. It belongs to the

(1)
block codes which is the former error correcting code
N-l developed. In this work, k=4 and n=7 are taken by addition
s(t) L
k=O Xkexp(j2nk�ft)
= of 3 parity bits.
(2)
Algorithm of hamming code:
Where Xk is the data symbol, N is the FFT length, 11[=liT is T
The matrix G= (lkl-A ) is known as a generator matrix of
frequency spacing.
linear (n, k) code
The received signal is then given by
And H= (A I In-k) is known as a parity-check matrix
For the construction of this generator and parity check
matrix the following rules have to be followed which

Fifth International Conference on Eco-Friendly Computing and Communication Systems (ICECCS 2016)
 60
T
satisfies HG =O. H is a matrix which has nonzero 'n-tuples' not an issue. (n - k) identity matrix is to its right hand side
in the left side, where in, the order of the 'n-tuples' matrix is

Fig.2.Block diagram of an OFDM system for underwater communication

By taking the transpose of the left hand side of H matrix, G To increase the performance of a communication system,
can be obtained. when increasing transmitter power is impractical, block
The code generator matrix G and the parity-check codes are used [8]. Hamming codes incorporate mUlti-path
matrix H are: communications, high decoding efficiency and reliability

[�
G= 0 0 0 1 1 [9]. Multiple-path Forward Error Correction (M-FEC)

H=
1

1 0
0

0
0

1
1

1 0
0

1
] approach of Hamming coding improves the performance
and energy efficiency [10]. Without using any of the error
correction schemes, it is not possible to provide low BER
performance in the extreme conditions. FEC that is using the

[� 0

1
1

1
1

1
0

0
1

At last, non-systematic codes of the

7J matrices can be
Hamming Coding scheme is an approach to improve BER.
The hamming code implementation with OFDM transmitter
and receiver is shown in Fig.3.
obtained by the following operations
1. Column permutations
2. Elementary row operations

Fig 3.Hamming code block diagram

Fig.4. LDPe code block diagram

Fifth International Conference on Eco-Friendly Computing and Communication Systems (ICECCS 2016)

After applying hamming code, BER is calculated and is
found to be improved than the earlier case of using OFDM
alone without coding
(ii).Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) Code
Low-density parity-check (LDPC) code is a linear error
correcting code. LDPC codes are block codes that have
parity-check matrix containing only a few number of non-
zero entries. LDPC codes are also a type of linear block
codes just as hamming codes. It is used to reduce errors and
to achieve convincing transmit performance of underwater
digital signal. Here in this paper a regular (3, 6) LDPC code
with a rate of Y2 is used. The check matrix H of 128x256 is
built by using random construction method [11].
Fig.5.BER curves for OFDM and FEC codes in UWC
V. CONCLUSIONS
This paper reports the BER performance of Hamming
code and LDPC codes for UWC application using OFDM
technique. The bandwidth efficiency of the scheme can be
improved by the use of 8 PSK or QAM for subcarrier
modulation. Also application of convolutional codes has to
be studied. Application of diversity techniques and
interleaving will further improve the performance of
communication system against fading channel impairments.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are grateful to the administration of National
Institute of Technology, Warangal.
REFERENCES
[I] Prashant Kumar, Vinay Kumar Trivedi, Preetam Kumar."Recent
Trends in Multicarrier Underwater Acoustic Communications", 2014.
[2] Mohammad-Ali Khalighi, Chadi Gabriel, Tasnim Hamza, Salah
Bourennane Pierre L'eon, Vincent Rigaud,"Underwater Wireless
Optical communication;Recent Advances and Remaining
Challenges",ICTON 2014.
Fifth International Conference on Eco-Friendly Computing and Communication Systems (ICECCS 2016)
61
UWC with LDPC codes construction is as shown in Fig 4.
The data that is to be transmitted is LDPC encoded and sent
to the OFDM transmitter. The data is decoded at the
receiver using LDPC decoder.
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
Fig.5 shows the BER curves of the UWC system, with and
without Forward error correction obtained using Matlab. It
can be seen that the BER performance is better when block
codes are applied, LDPC performs better than hamming
code for a given SNR. The results obtained in this work are
better than reported in [6].
[3] B.Pranitha,Dr.L.Anjaneyulu.,"Recent Trends in Underwater
Communications-A Technical Survey", Published in ICCSP 2016.
[4] James Preisig and Milica Stojanovic, (2009) "Underwater acoustic
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[7] Jeong-woo Han, Se-young Kim, Ki-man Kim,Seung-yong Chun,
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[8] Yuri Labrador, Masoumeh Karimi , Deng Pan, and Jerry
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 62

[9] Junfeng Xu and Tao Zhang, Zhongding Dong, "On Forward error
Correction with Hamming Code for Multi-path Communications",
978-1-4673-5829-3/12 ©2012 IEEE

[10] S.Suganthi, S.Sathya, "Segment based Reliable Multipath

Communication in Underwater Sensor Network", IJCSNS
International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security,
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[ll]Yuxiang Li, Guolong lian, GuangpuZha, Jin Fu, "The Application of

LDPC Code in Underwater Acoustic Wireless Communications",
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Fifth International Conference on Eco-Friendly Computing and Communication Systems (ICECCS 2016)