Zadoff–Chu Sequence Pilot for Time and Frequency Synchronization in UWA OFDM System

In underwater communications for 6G, Doppler effects cause the coherent time to become similar to or shorter than the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbol length. Conventional time and frequency synchronization methods require additional training symbols for synchronization, which reduces the traffic data rate. This paper proposes the Zadoff–Chu sequence (ZCS) pilot-based OFDM for time and frequency synchronization. The proposed method transmits ZCS as a pilot for OFDM symbols and simultaneously transmits traffic data to increase the traffic data rate while estimating the CFO at each coherence time. For time–frequency synchronization, the correlation of the ZCS pilot is used to perform coarse and fine time and frequency synchronization in two stages. Since the traffic data cause interference with the correlation of ZCS pilots, we theoretically analyzed the relationship between the amount of traffic data and interference and verified it through computer simulations. The synchronization and BER performance of the proposed ZCS pilot-based OFDM were evaluated by conduction computer simulations and a practical ocean experiment. Compared to the methods of Ren, Yang, and Avrashi, the proposed method demonstrated a 6.3% to 14.3% increase in traffic data rate with similar BER performance and a 2 dB to 3.8 dB SNR gain for a 14.3% to 23.8% decrease in traffic data rate.