Time Reversal Aided Bidirectional OFDM Underwater Cooperative Communication Algorithm with the Same Frequency Transmission

In underwater acoustic channel, signal transmission may experience significant latency and attenuation that would degrade the performance of underwater communication. The cooperative communication technique can solve it but the spectrum efficiency is lower than traditional underwater communication. So we proposed a time reversal aided bidirectional OFDM underwater cooperative communication algorithm. The algorithm allows all underwater sensor nodes to share the same uplink and downlink frequency simultaneously to improve the spectrum efficiency. Since the same frequency transmission would produce larger intersymbol interference, we adopted the time reversal method to degrade the multipath interference at first; then we utilized the self-information cancelation module to remove the self-signal of OFDM block because it is known for sensor nodes. In the simulation part, we compare our proposed algorithm with the existing underwater cooperative transmission algorithms in respect of bit error ratio, transmission rate, and computation. The results show that our proposed algorithm has double spectrum efficiency under the same bit error ratio and has the higher transmission rate than the other underwater communication methods.