Design and Implementation of an OFDM-based Voice Transmission System for

Mobile Underwater Vehicles

Seyyed Mahmood Jafari Sadeghi Mostafa Derakhtian Mohammad Ali Masnadi-Shirazi

School of Electrical and
Computer Engineering
Shiraz University
Shiraz, Iran
mjafari@shirazu.ac.ir
School of Electrical and
Computer Engineering
Shiraz University
Shiraz, Iran
derakhtian@shirazu.ac.ir
School of Electrical and
Computer Engineering
Shiraz University
Shiraz, Iran
masnadi@shirazu.ac.ir

Abstract—In this paper, we present an Orthogonal Fre-

quency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based system, which
is designed and implemented to transmit voice signal, over
UnderWater Acoustic (UWA) channels. The system is software-
based and using two Laptops, it would be possible to transmit
and receive digital voice between two Underwater Vehicles
(UV). System parameters are tuned for underwater acoustic
channel observed in the Persian Gulf. The system may be used
for speeds, up to 30 nautical miles per hour. Eventually some
experimental results are presented that show the power of the
system to achieve the desired performance.
Keywords-OFDM system, Voice Transceiver, Underwater
Acoustic channel.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Since electromagnetic waves do not propagate well in
conductive environment of sea water, the best choice for
digital data transmission is to use acoustic waves. Use of
acoustic waves to transmit data in underwater channels,
has been under research for more than three decades [1].
This transmission method causes several issues that eventu-
ally reduce the data rate of underwater acoustic channels,
significantly. Most of the problems in underwater acoustic
communication result from the very low traveling speed of
the acoustic waves (1500m/s) in comparison with electro-
magnetic waves. Large time spreads and wide-band Doppler
effects, Doppler scale, are two of these problems [3]. In
addition, the wind causes variations in surface of the water,
which leads the underwater acoustic channel to be a fast-
fading channel [3].
In 1980s, researchers used orthogonal non-coherent mod-
ulation schemes like the Frequency Shift Keying (FSK)
and differentially coherent modulation schemes like the
Differentially Phase Shift Keying (DPSK), in underwater
acoustic communications [1]-[2]. Use of coherent modula-
tion schemes was difficult due to fast phase rotations of
the UWA channel until 1994, when an adaptive equalizer
integrated with Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) was proposed in
[4], to track phase rotations of the UWA channel. After the
OFDM technique was proposed in wireless communication
Figure 1. Block diagram of transmitter
(employed in numerous wireless standards such as: IEEE
802.11a), researchers came with the idea of applying the
OFDM technique in UWA channels [5].
We have designed and implemented a system, based on
OFDM modulation technique for the UWA channel of the
Persian Gulf. In section II, the structure of the transmitter
will be explained, in section III, some details about receiver
algorithms are presented, in section IV, the user interface
of the system is introduced, in section V, the experimental
results are represented and finally concluding remarks are
added in section VI.
II. T RANSMITTER S TRUCTURE
Figure 1, shows the structure of the transmitter. Available
bandwidth of the system is restricted to the bandwidth of the
acoustic transducers. The bandwidth is just 4-KHz centered
at the carrier frequency of 8-KHz. Sampling frequency is
chosen 48-KSPS which is the standard sampling rate of
nearly all Laptop and PC sound-cards.
A. Voice Compression
The Standard sampling rate for a voice signal is 8000
samples per second, with resolution of 8-bits, which requires
data rate of 64-Kbps for transmission. Considering the
available bandwidth which is just 4-KHz, data transmission
with the rate of 64-Kbps requires very high power which
is practically impossible. So we used the Mixed Excitation
Linear Prediction (MELP) 2.4-Kbps voice coder to reduce
the data rate of transmission from 64-Kbps to 2.4-Kbps [6].

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 Figure 2. Structure of data frames
Figure 3. Subcarrier assignment of each OFDM symbol
Compression Ratio (CR) of the MELP algorithm is nearly
27. Data rate required to transmit output data of the vocoder
is 2400 bps, which is acquirable using the 4-KHz bandwidth.
B. Channel Coding
To reduce overall BER of the system, the convolutional
coding of rate 12 with generator polynomial [171 133]
and the coding depth of 7 is used. At the receiver side,
Viterbi decoding algorithm with trace-back length of 34
is used to recover data bits. Soft decoding of data bits
using Approximate Log-Likelihood Ratio (ALLR) algorithm
is considered which has better performance than the hard
decoding algorithm [7].
C. Data framing
In this system, the data is transmitted in the form of frames
(data bursts), with duration of 765 milli-seconds each. Data
transmission in the form of frames has two benefits: First,
it facilitates the timing synchronization at the receiver side,
second, the the Doppler scale can be estimated by knowing
the frame length sent by the transmitter and estimating the
frame length at the receiver [11]. Frame structure of the
system is depicted in Figure 2.
As shown in Figure 2, a Hyperbolic Frequency Modulated
(HFM) Chirp signal of length 17ms is inserted at the
beginning of each frame [9]. The chirp signal marks the
beginning of the frame for the receiver. After the chirp
signal, a null time is inserted to avoid interference of the
chirp signal with the other portions of the frame. This time
should be greater than the time-spread of the channel. Data
portion of each frame consists of five OFDM symbols. Each
OFDM symbol has a length of 128ms and 18ms zero-pad.
Zero-Pad (ZP) OFDM is used instead of conventional Cyclic
Prefix (CP) OFDM to avoid the dissipation of power in the
CP portion [8].
D. Subcarrier assignment of OFDM symbols
Figure 3 demonstrates the assignment of subcarriers of
each OFDM symbol. Each OFDM symbol consists of 512
subcarriers. 128 of these are used as pilots to estimate the
channel at the receiver. Pilot sequences are inserted equally-
spaced to facilitate use of the Least Squares (LS) channel
estimation algorithm [14]. Also, 9 null subcarriers (virtual
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Figure 4. Block diagram of receiver
subcarriers) are inserted, which are exploited to estimate the
Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) at the receiver side.
E. PAPR Reduction
One of the main disadvantages of OFDM technique is its
high Peak to Average Power Ratio also known as PAPR.
In this system, we used the clipping method to reduce the
amount of PAPR [10]. The optimum clipping threshold is
derived via simulation.
III. R ECEIVER S TRUCTURE
Figure 4 describes the structure of the receiver. All of the
processing of the receiver (except the signal preamplifier
and the transducer) are just software algorithms operating
in real-time. Thus, the required hardware are just a Laptop
or PC, transducers and signal amplifiers.
A. Timing synchronization and the Doppler scale estimation
Timing synchronization is the determination of the start
of frame and consequently the exact timing position of the
OFDM symbols. In this system, the timing synchronization
is achieved by correlating the input samples with local copy
of the HFM chirp signal. The metric M (d) defined in (1), is
calculated over the input samples. Whenever M (d) exceeds
a predefined threshold, the existence of a frame is declared
and the peak of M (d), shows the exact beginning of the
frame. ∑N −1
| m=0 y[d + m]S ∗ [m]|
M (d) = √∑ (1)
N −1 2
m=0 |y[d + m]|
In (1), y[.] represents the received samples, S[.] is the
known HFM Chirp signal and ∗ is the complex conjugate
operation. Because of the Doppler scale phenomenon in
mobile acoustic systems [3], the frame length at receiver
is not equal to the frame length at the transmitter side. If
the Doppler scale is not compensated, performance of the
system is reduced significantly due the wide-band nature
of the Doppler effect. Here, we estimate and compensate
the Doppler scale using the method described in [11]. An
estimate of the Doppler scale can be calculated by:
ˆ = Trx − 1
∆ (2)
Ttx
000050
 ˆ is the estimate of the Doppler scale, Trx is the
In (2), ∆
calculated frame length at the receiver and Ttx is the frame
length at the transmitter which is 765-ms.
The length of the received frame is extracted using the
chirps of two consecutive frames. The Doppler scale is com-
pensated using computationally efficient linear interpolation
method [11].
B. CFO estimation
As described in [12], inaccurate estimation of the Doppler
scale parameter, causes the signal to suffer from narrow-
band Doppler shift or in other terms CFO. If the CFO is not
compensated, subcarriers would not be orthogonal anymore
and this would cause an increase in BER. In our system,
estimation of CFO is accomplished by exploiting the null
subcarriers. The idea is to minimize the cost function derived
in [13]: ∑
H 2
J(ϵ) = |ν H
i P y| (3)
i∈Γz
Figure 5. Deployed Graphical User Interface of project
ϵ̂ = arg min J(ϵ) (4)
ϵ

where in (3), νi is a 512 × 1 vector with the nth element

j2π(n−1)i
given by √5121
e 512 , P is 512 × 512 diagonal matrix,
P = diag(1, ej2πϵ , ..., ej2π×511×ϵ ), y is the 512×1 vector of
the samples of received OFDM symbol, H is the Hermitian
operator and Γz is the subset of null subcarriers.
In noiseless conditions, the cost function of the equation
(3) which shows the energy of null subcarriers is minimized
for the correct value of ϵ, so ϵ̂ defined in (4) would provide
an estimate of ϵ.
C. OverLap and Add Receiver
Since, instead of conventional method of CP-OFDM, ZP-
Figure 6. Location of transmitter and receiver on Google Earth program
OFDM is used, another processing is required before the
FFT operation. The method is called OverLap and Add and
is described in [8]. The performance is reduced a little bit,
to receive/transmit the samples of voice/modulated signal.
since the optimal detection of ZP-OFDM is not used, but
The GUI has the ability to select between different sound-
the energy saving due to elimination of the redundant CP
cards that are installed on the PC or Laptop. Also, the frame
portion is significant.
detection threshold, transmitter power and volume of the
D. Channel Estimation voice signal are tunable via the GUI.
We used the LS method described in [14] to estimate V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
and compensate the channel. The LS channel estimation is
simplified when the pilot symbols are equally-spaced and Some experiments were performed in the the Persian Gulf,
can be accomplished efficiently by the use of Fast Fourier near Bandar Bushehr. Table I summarizes the parameters
Transform (FFT) and Inverse FFT (IFFT) operations [14]. of the system used in the experiments. The exact positions
of the transmitter and the receiver are depicted in the
IV. G RAPHICAL U SER I NTERFACE (GUI) Figure 6. The position of the transmitter was : Latitude :
The processing algorithms of the transmitter and the 2859’56.65”N Longitude : 5041’46.52”E and the position
receiver are written in C language. But a graphical user of the receiver was Latitude : 29 1’15.36”N Longitude :
interface has been designed by using the Visual C# lan- 5038’28.27”E .The transmitter and the receiver were ap-
guage, to ease the use of the program. Figure 5 shows proximately 6-Km apart. The depth of water in that region
the Graphical User Interface of the system. As mentioned is nearly 16 meters. The transducers’ depth were 3 meters.
before, the program uses sound-card of the PC or Laptop Speed of the wind was 13 Km/h, at the time of experiment.

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 Table I
S YSTEM PARAMETERS [2] G. R. Mackelburg, S. J. Watson, and A. Gordon, Benthic 4800
bps acoustic telemetry, presented at the Oceans81, Boston,
Parameter Value MA, 1981.
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Carrier frequency 8-KHz nication channels: Propagation models and statistical charac-
Sample rate 48-KHz terization,” Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.47, no.1,
Total number of subcarriers 512 pp.84-89, January 2009.
Number of data subcarriers 375
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Number of OFDM symbols per frame 5 pp.100-111, Jan 1994.
Subcarrier spacing ≈ 7.8 Hz
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Frame length 765ms Huang; Hao Zhou; , ”DSP implementation of SISO and MIMO
Frame marker length (chirp signal) 17ms OFDM acoustic modems,” OCEANS 2010 IEEE - Sydney ,
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Gaurd intervals 18ms
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Depth of water 16-m Vol. 16, February 1998.
Depth of transducers 3-m
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VI. C ONCLUSION [11] Sharif, B.S.; Neasham, J.; Hinton, O.R.; Adams, A.E.; , ”A
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Acoustic Channels With Nonuniform Doppler Shifts,” Oceanic
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Engineering, IEEE Journal of , vol.33, no.2, pp.198-209, April
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