A case study on underwater communication based on 5G technology

Today's technology has begun to improve very fast and communication technology tries to adapt this positive change. Bigger bandwidths become a strong requirement for improved communication technology. In order to satisfy these requirements, RF 5G technology has been developed which promises a faster communication experience for end users. Faster communication not only requires bigger bandwidths but also requires a reliable and robust connection between end users. However, it is not possible to meet the new RF 5G requirements with old communication techniques since 5G aims to operate at 1 Ghz and above which brings problems as multipath, scattering due to the increase in radio frequency. Fortunately, 5G community has solved these multipath and scattering problems in the data link layer. In underwater acoustic communication, the most challenging tasks are to recover incoming signal from multipath and scattering effects and without a state of the receiver design, it is very hard to communicate. However, we noticed that the multipath and scattering problems of RF 5G technology which arises due to the increase in frequency are the also the basic problems of Underwater communication systems. RF 5G technology has solved this problem in the data link layer by using OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) as a modulation scheme which has started to be used with the introduction of 4G technology together with Polar Codes as forward error coding of control channel. Therefore, we decided to create a state-of-the-art system that combines data link layer of RF 5G technology with best underwater acoustic (UWA) communication techniques to overcome multipath and scattering problems of UWA and we called this system Underwater 5G technology. In this thesis, in order to construct a real time operating end to end UWA system we combined many successful telecommunication techniques of both RF and UWA communication. This system, which is called Underwater 5G technology, is prepared on MATLAB with System Generator blocks therefore it can be directly implemented on Xilinx's FPGAs. We explained every step of the design and cleared the reasons of why the specific modules are used. In this way, the users of the system can tune the parameters according to their system performance requirements. Underwater 5G Technology has a robust design that can establish a reliable connection at very noisy channels. As the performance criteria, the system can communicate at 6 dB SNR (Signal to Noise ratio) with very low bit error rate. These ratings are nearly hundred times better than similar works on the literature. Underwater 5G technology not only better in terms of performance criteria but also it is more applicable with its easy design parameters.