The increasing interest in next-generation underwater acoustic communications networks is due to vast investigation of oceans for oceanography, commercial operations in maritime areas, military surveillance, and more. A surface buoy or underwater base station controller (UBSC) communicates with either transceivers or underwater base stations (UBSs) via acoustic links. Transceivers further communicate with underwater sensor nodes using acoustic links. In this paper, we employ a downlink (DL) power allocation (PA) strategy using an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) technique for underwater acoustic communications (UAC) networks. First, we present an approach to power offsets using three kinds of pilot spacing and apply the power boosting (PB) concept on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols for the UAC network. Secondly, we draw the block error rate (BLER) curves from link-level simulation (LLS) and analyze the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for both PA and non-PA strategies. Lastly, we adopt the best PB for system-level simulation (SLS) and compare the throughput and outage performance for PA and non-PA strategies. Hence, the simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the DL PA strategy for UAC networks.
Downlink Power Allocation Strategy for Next-Generation Underwater Acoustic Communications Networks
