Abstract
In this paper, for the purpose of providing high data rate services, the multi-hop frame structure is designed for the underwater acoustic (UWA) short-range system which is proposed as a part of ocean surveillance and tracking network (OSTN). Under the measured underwater channel environment, the link-level system performance are also evaluated. Simulation results show not only the packet error rate (PER) comparisons, but the optimal modulation and coding scheme (MCS) levels for the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based short-range UWA communications network.