In an OFDM system, a high rate bit stream is divided into several low rate streams that are transmitted in
parallel and simultaneously on different frequency, i.e. sub-carriers. By parallel transmission, the symbol
duration is increased; therefore the relative amount of time dispersion, which is caused by multipath delay
spread, is decreased. To avoid inter-symbol interference (ISI), a guard interval (GI) is inserted into OFDM
symbols. The length of GI is chosen to exceed the channel delay spread. Meanwhile for avoiding the inter-
channel interference (ICI), OFDM symbols in the guard interval are cyclically extended. The major sources of
distortion for underwater acoustic communication systems are multipath fading and ISI. OFDM has
significant advantages with bandwidth efficiency, immunity against ISI and combating frequency selective
fading