Joint Equalization and Phase Drift Estimation for Underwater Acoustic Communications

In this paper we present a solution for joint equalization and phase drift compensation for the underwater acoustic (UWA) channel. In particular, we aim at compensating the vehicular component of the Doppler effect. This component is modeled resorting to a random walk model with a linear drift. It will be estimated using a Bayesian filtering technique, namely, the sequential importance sampling (SIS) algorithm, also known as particle filter (PF). The equalization will be attained using an iterative frequency-domain equalizer (IFDE). Performance results, obtained using state-of-the-art UWA channel models, are presented.