Frequency Spreading Doppler Scaling Compensation in Underwater Acoustic Multicarrier Communications

In underwater acoustic (UWA) communications, the mobility of communicating vehicles results in a change of the time scale in the received signal. This is called Doppler scaling. Doppler scaling, although small (usually 1%, or smaller), impacts the receiver performance significantly, if uncompensated. This paper suggests a novel method for compensating Doppler scaling in filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) systems. We show that the method of frequency spreading that have already been applied to the design of digital filters can be applied to each subcarrier in FBMC systems to compensate the impact of Doppler scaling. This novel approach compensates for Doppler scaling with a very small addition in the complexity.