Robust Equalization of Mobile Underwater Acoustic Channels

Abstract

Several underwater acoustic channels exhibit impulsive ambient noise. As a consequence, communication receivers implemented on the basis of the Gaussian noise assumption may yield poor performance even at moderate signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). This paper presents a new channel-estimate-based decision feedback equalizer (CEB-DFE) that deals with high platform mobility, exploits any sparse multipath structure, and maintains robustness under impulsive noise. The key component of this DFE is a linear-complexity sparse channel estimator, which has the ability to detect and reject impulses based on two noise models: contaminated Gaussian and symmetric alpha stable (SαS). By processing phase-shift keying (PSK) signals from three mobile shallow-water acoustic links, the gain of the proposed receiver over existing equalizers is demonstrated.