A power domain UFMC system design for underwater optical communication with reduced PAPR

The Power-Domain Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (PD-UFMC) waveform is one of the most promising technologies for the upcoming modern Underwater Optical Communication (UOC) systems due to its significant benefits in terms of bandwidth performance, massive connectivity, multi-path fading robustness and short-packed burst support. However, it is unfortunate that the PD-UFMC based UOC (PD-UFMC-UOC) waveform suffers from the high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) problem as it is multi-carrier in nature. Therefore, this paper introduces a new PD-UFMC-UOC waveform method based on Discrete Sine Transform (DST) precoding that is designed to solve the aforementioned problem by reducing the high PAPR. In addition, DST precoding is also capable of taking advantage of the frequency variations in the multipath UOC channel that can help to reduce the Bit Error Rate (BER). MATLAB® computer simulations were performed to demonstrate the performance as well as to evaluate the proposed PD-UFMC-UOC waveform. It is concluded by observing the simulation results that the proposed waveform outperforms the UOC waveform based on Power Domain Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (PD-OFDM) in terms of reducing the high PAPR values.