Spectrally Efficient Non-Orthogonal Discrete Multi-Tone Transmission for Underwater Wireless Optical Communication With Low-Complexity High Performance ICI Mitigation

In this article, a novel spectrally efficient non-orthogonal discrete multi-tone (NODMT) system is proposed for the bandwidth-starved underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) to compensate for the insufficient bandwidth of components. Different from other non-orthogonal systems with complex-valued correlation matrices, the designed NODMT system has a real-valued correlation matrix, which is significant in reducing the complexity of decoders, e.g., the complexity of the proposed NODMT with iterative detection (ID) algorithm can be reduced by 50% as compared to the conventional non-orthogonal system with ID. However, in circumstances of higher spectrum efficiency (SE), the non-orthogonality is intensified and inter-carrier interference (ICI) becomes severer, leading to the sharp deterioration of ID decoding capability. The traditional sphere decoding (SD) algorithm cannot solve this issue because Cholesky decomposition only works with the positive definite matrix. Therefore, we propose a novel SD algorithm based on QR decomposition, named QRSD, which effectively compensates for the insufficient decoding capability of the ID algorithm in the case of higher SE. By combining ID and QRSD methods, over 40% complexity reduction and nearly identical BER performance with QRSD are achieved. Through a proof-of-concept UWOC experiment, a 3.31-Gbps NODMT transmission with up to 24.44% data rate promotion is demonstrated, and the feasibility/effectiveness of the proposed ID-QRSD algorithm in different turbidity water is verified. Moreover, we have experimentally realized 75-m/2.66-Gbps and 60-m/3.02-Gbps underwater transmission with 15% and 25% bandwidth savings, respectively. This UWOC system with high SE shows great potential in the bandwidth-limited UWOC and underwater internet of things (UIoT).