M-ary frequency shift keying communications over an underwater acoustic channel: Performance comparison of data with models

The bit error rate (BER) is modeled for M-ary frequency-shift-keying (MFSK) signals in a fading channel using different envelope amplitude statistics and compared with frequency-hopping (FH) FSK signaling data collected during the TREX04 experiment, which used Binary FSK (BFSK) for each symbol. The BER data is found to be significantly higher than that of a Rayleigh fading channel and is found to agree with that modeled with a K-distribution amplitude fading distribution. Using the parameters of the K-distribution, independently measured from the M-sequence data collected in the same experiment, the modeled BER as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) agrees well with the measured BER within the SNR of the data. This suggests that the BER of FH-FSK signaling can be predicted given some prior channel characterization measurements.