ABSTRACT The success of multicarrier modulation in the form of OFDM in radio channels illuminates a path one could take towards high-rate underwater acoustic communications, and recently there are inten- sive investigations on underwater OFDM. In this paper, we imple- ment the acoustic OFDM transmitter and receiver design of [4, 5] on a TMS320C6713 DSP board. We analyze the workload and identify the most time-consuming operations. Based on the work- load analysis, we tune the algorithms and optimize the code to sub- stantially reduce the synchronization time to 0.2 seconds and the processing time of one OFDM block to 1.7 seconds on a DSP pro- cessor at 225 MHz. This experimentation provides guidelines on our future work to reduce the per-block processing time to be less than the block duration of . seconds for real time operations.