Symbol by symbol Doppler rate estimation for highly mobile underwater OFDM

Abstract

We propose an OFDM receiver capable of estimating and correcting, on a symbol-by-symbol basis, the subcarrier dependent Doppler shifting due to the movement of source and receiver in an underwater acoustic network. We propose two methods of estimation: one of which is based upon the marginal maximum likelihood principle, and one of which is ad-hoc. We compare the performance of both estimators to the Cramer-Rao lower bound. We show through simulation that the proposed receiver design performs well for a source that is accelerating at 0.29 m/s2.