Doppler estimation and correction for shallow underwater acoustic communications

Abstract

Reliable mobile underwater acoustic communication systems must compensate for strong, time-varying Doppler effects. Many Doppler correction techniques rely on a single bulk correction to compensate first-order effects. In many cases, residual higher-order effects must be tracked and corrected using other methods. The contributions of this paper are evaluations of (1) signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance from three Doppler estimation and correction methods and (2) communication performance of Doppler correction with static vs. adaptive equalizers. The evaluations use our publicly available shallow water experimental dataset, which consists of 360 packet transmission samples (each 0.5s long) from a five-channel receiver array.