Multipath cluster alignment equalization for single-element high data rate deep-sea acoustic communication

Area of Science:

• Underwater Acoustic Communications
• Signal Processing
• Electrical Engineering

Background:

• Deep-sea acoustic channels present challenges like multipath uncertainty, spread, and time variation.
• Single-receiving-element systems require robust architectures to overcome these channel impairments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a receiver architecture for high-rate, single-element deep-sea acoustic communication.
• To exploit the clustered sparsity of deep-sea channels using multipath cluster alignment (MCA).

Main Methods:

• A receiver employing an MCA pre-equalizer followed by a channel estimation-based turbo equalizer (CE-TEQ).
• MCA pre-equalizer aligns multipath clusters (MCs) for joint equalization, effectively creating shorter sub-channels.
• CE-TEQ suppresses residual inter-symbol interference (ISI) on the equivalent channel.

Main Results:

• The proposed receiver architecture outperforms traditional receivers in simulations and deep-sea experiments.
• Error-free communication was achieved at a maximum effective data rate of 5019.6 bps.
• Successful communication was demonstrated over a 20 km distance using a single receiving element.

Conclusions:

• The MCA technique effectively addresses the complexities of deep-sea acoustic channels.
• The developed receiver offers a significant performance enhancement for high-rate underwater communication systems.
• This approach enables reliable, high-speed data transmission in challenging deep-sea environments.