Multicarrier Communication Over Underwater Acoustic Channels With Nonuniform Doppler Shifts

TLDR

Underwater acoustic channels are wideband because the carrier frequency is small relative to the signal bandwidth, leading to frequency‑dependent Doppler shifts. The study proposes treating the channel as having a common Doppler scaling factor and introduces a two‑step mitigation strategy: resampling to convert the wideband problem into a narrowband one, followed by high‑resolution uniform compensation of the residual Doppler. Zero‑padded OFDM is employed to reduce transmission power, with null subcarriers aiding Doppler compensation, pilot subcarriers enabling channel estimation, and a block‑by‑block receiver that does not depend on inter‑block channel correlation, as demonstrated using data from two shallow‑water experiments near Woods Hole. The approach achieves excellent performance even when transmitter and receiver move at relative speeds up to 10 kn, where Doppler shifts exceed the OFDM subcarrier spacing, indicating that OFDM is a viable option for high‑rate communications over wideband UWA channels with nonuniform Doppler shifts.

Abstract

Underwater acoustic (UWA) channels are wideband in nature due to the small ratio of the carrier frequency to the signal bandwidth, which introduces frequency-dependent Doppler shifts. In this paper, we treat the channel as having a common Doppler scaling factor on all propagation paths, and propose a two-step approach to mitigating the Doppler effect: 1) nonuniform Doppler compensation via resampling that converts a "wideband" problem into a "narrowband" problem and 2) high-resolution uniform compensation of the residual Doppler. We focus on zero-padded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to minimize the transmission power. Null subcarriers are used to facilitate Doppler compensation, and pilot subcarriers are used for channel estimation. The receiver is based on block-by-block processing, and does not rely on channel dependence across OFDM blocks; thus, it is suitable for fast-varying UWA channels. The data from two shallow-water experiments near Woods Hole, MA, are used to demonstrate the receiver performance. Excellent performance results are obtained even when the transmitter and the receiver are moving at a relative speed of up to 10 kn, at which the Doppler shifts are greater than the OFDM subcarrier spacing. These results suggest that OFDM is a viable option for high-rate communications over wideband UWA channels with nonuniform Doppler shifts.