MU-Massive MIMO for UWA Communication

Abstract

The present paper considers the application of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) to a multiuser (MU) underwater acoustic (UWA) communication system. In the scope to achieve a high throughput within a limited acoustic bandwidth, we consider filterbank multicarrier (FBMC) modulation for waveform shaping instead of the widely used orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). We assess the performance of the system in a 1 km simulated time-varying underwater acoustic channel (UAC) in terms of bit error rate (BER), packet error rate (PER) and maximum achievable throughput. The transmission scenario consists of four users, each one equipped with multiple transmitting hydrophones. We show that the implementation of massive MIMO at the receiver allows all the users to use the same frequency bandwidth to transmit their information reliably to the receiver. Therefore, a high spectral efficiency and throughput can be achieved, making the transmission of multimedia data such as high quality real-time video a reality.

Hybrid Space-Frequency Access for Underwater Acoustic Networks

“…Some attempts to recast the principles of M-MIMO in the underwater context were recently done and focused on the uplink. In fact, a multi-user scenario is considered in [21], [22] where a central node equipped with a large hydrophone array receives data simultaneously from 4 AUVs. In those works, modified filter bank multi-carrier modulation schemes are proposed to counterbalance the time-frequency dispersion introduced by the channel.…”

“…Moreover, equalization applied to the large array equipping the receiver allows multiuser interference to be mitigated. However, some doubts rise about the feasibility and practicability of such network architecture, since simulation results shown in [21], [22] suggest that the receiving node should be equipped with an array of at least 40 hydrophones to provide good communication performance for all the transmitting nodes.…”

“…In fact, to the best of our knowledge, the works mentioned above are the only ones dealing with multi-user interference in a underwater M-MIMO scenario. Moreover, in [21], [22] interference is addressed at the physical layer, while no straight reference to MAC issues is reported. The potential adoption of M-MIMO for access management in the underwater context may be suggested by the similarity between the structure of UWANs, very often characterized by a centralized node and multiple secondary ones as in [21], [22], [23], and cellular networks, with a base station usually serving different users.…”

“…Moreover, in [21], [22] interference is addressed at the physical layer, while no straight reference to MAC issues is reported. The potential adoption of M-MIMO for access management in the underwater context may be suggested by the similarity between the structure of UWANs, very often characterized by a centralized node and multiple secondary ones as in [21], [22], [23], and cellular networks, with a base station usually serving different users. However hardware capabilities and signal processing techniques supporting cellular communications are significantly different from those characterizing UWACs.…”

Shallow Underwater Acoustic Massive MIMO Communications

“…In [19], a large number of receive hydrophones have been utilized to support high-reliability underwater sensor networks. Based on the filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) modulation, realtime video and multiuser UWA transmission using a large receive hydrophone array at the receiver have been discussed in [20] and [21], respectively. Note that the aforementioned works on UWA massive MIMO communications only consider a large number of hydrophones deployed at the receiver.…”