Sparse channel estimation for long range underwater acoustic communication

Long-range underwater acoustic communication (LR-UWAC) is an essential technique for applications such as remotely control of unmanned underwater vehicles, gliders, or tactical submarines for long term monitoring tasks. In this paper, we propose a non-trivial combination of the block subspace pursuit and the distributed subspace pursuit algorithms to exploit the block structure of the channel. The former is aimed to exploit the block structure of LR-UWAC channel, and the latter derives a joint sparse recovery algorithm for efficient LR-UWAC channel estimation. Results from a sea experiment demonstrate the efficiency of our approach to accurately estimate the channel compared to state-of-the-art benchmarks.