Multi‐carrier chaotic communication scheme for underwater acoustic communications

Multi‐carrier (MC) and spread‐spectrum (SS) are two good technologies for underwater acoustic (UWA) communications. In this study, the authors propose a novel MC chaos modulation scheme, which combines code‐shifted differential chaos shift keying (CS‐DCSK) with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), namely MC‐CS‐DCSK. The proposed scheme exploits the orthogonal characteristic of the Walsh code to superimpose the chaotic reference chips and the information bearing chips in the same time/frequency unit. Besides, a cyclic‐shift interleaver is used on chips to harvest frequency diversity. To the in‐depth understanding of the proposed system, the bit error rate (BER) of the proposed system under Gaussian channels and multipath Rayleigh fading channels are derived and verified by simulation. Furthermore, the spectral efficiency of the proposed system is analysed and compared with some existing chaos‐based communication systems. Finally, they study BER performance of the system under UWA channels and compare it with traditional MC direct sequence SS and OFDM‐based MC‐DCSK systems. Simulation results show that the system has good robustness under time‐varying UWA channels.