AMMCA: Acoustic Massive MIMO with Carrier Aggregation to Boost the Underwater Communication Data Rate

A new communication approach based on massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) with Carrier Aggregation (CA), named AMMCA, is proposed to boost the achievable data rate for multimedia traffic in underwater acoustic channels. The system under study is composed of a surface buoy station with many hydrophones and of an underwater static or mobile node such as an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) with a few transducers. The proposed idea presents two components: (i) the first consists in deploying a large number of hydrophones at the buoy for uplink massive MIMO reception; (ii) the second requires employing carrier aggregation of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) symbols to exploit a wider underwater bandwidth than in traditional acoustic systems that use only a few tens of KHz. Via both theoretical analysis and computer-based simulations, AMMCA is shown to boost the achievable data rate in underwater acoustic channels for both medium/short and long distances.