Receiver Comparisons on an OFDM Design for Doppler Spread Channels

Underwater acoustic channels induce large Doppler drifts that render intercarrier interference (ICI) for OFDM transmissions. Assuming that after proper Doppler compensation the residual ICI is limited to only direct neighbors, we propose an OFDM signal design that decouples channel estimation and data demodulation. We investigate eight receivers that are categorized into three groups: (i) three receivers that ignore the residual ICI, (ii) three receivers that are based on a basis expansion model (BEM) and pursue channel estimation independently along each basis, and (iii) two receivers that are based on discrete-path modeling. The receiver performance is compared based on data from the SPACE experiment conducted off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, October 2008. The receiver based on the discrete-path modeling and a basis pursuit algorithm achieves the best performance while the receiver based on BEM and least-squares channel estimation performs the worst. The performance differences among different receivers drastically increase as the channel's Doppler spread and the signal constellation size increase. Interestingly, the BEM based receivers are often inferior to the ICI-ignorant counterparts, implying that the ability of ICI compensation could be limited by the estimation accuracy of the much increased number of model parameters.