Probe signal processing for channel estimation in underwater acoustic communication system

Underwater acoustic communication channels are characterized by a large variety of propagation conditions. Designing a reliable communication system requires knowledge of the transmission parameters of the channel, namely multipath delay spread, Doppler spread, coherence time, and coherence bandwidth. However, the possibilities of its estimation in a real-time underwater communication system are limited, mainly due to the computational time of implementations of the digital signal processing algorithms. The article presents the results of analysis of probe signals measured during a shallow water experiment. The implementation issues of estimation algorithms are discussed, assuming floating point arithmetic, and with both single-core and multi-core digital signal processors as the target platforms.